This week's workshop is on Green Homes. "Green" seems to be the new fad, so we had a lot of very enthusiastic teachers sign up. But since Ranken is a technical college, our workshop has a unique twist from most traditional professional development workshops - people just don't listen to lectures about green homes; they actually learn to build them. Our first day was on architecture and what it takes to design an environmentally-friendly home. Everyone got to design a loft space with pencil and paper (basically a condo), and then they tried to draw their designs on the computer with AutoCAD. AutoCAD is not something you pick up in an afternoon, so needless to say, the pencil and paper part was much more successful than the computer part.
Today's theme was carpentry, so all the teachers built walls. I guess to be environmentally friendly means you need to have muscles, because green home walls are built out of 9 foot long 2x6's that weigh a TON. Even though these women look pretty skinny, they wielded those hammers right alongside the guys.
The teachers also learned how to design rain gardens and build compost piles. Everybody made a sample compost pile out of a water bottle. Since it rained all day yesterday, I had to get up early this morning to stop by the local park for bags of compost. Not the most pleasant thing to do, since everything was pretty soggy.
