Download something to do with my hands

I can use my hands to eat foods like pizza and french fries. I can even hold hands with my parents so I don't get lost. Sometimes I use my hands in ways that make people sad.

I should never use my hands to hit. I should never use my hands to touch my classmates. I should never use my hands to push others. I should never use my hands to take things that belong to other people. I need to only use my hands for nice things like eating writing and clapping at school.

My teachers and parents like it when I use my hands in nice ways. Using my hands in NICE ways makes my friends happy too! Are you sure you want to empty your tray? This cannot be undone! Our instructionally appropriate mature images are restricted. Using My Hands. Download PDF. Other Download Formats Beta! PowerPoint Moveable Each page of your material is placed on a separate slide as a moveable picture. Share This Material.

Embed a medium thumbnail with only a title on your blog or other website. Embed a small thumbnail with no text on your blog or other website. His point is that the electrician is a better person than you. The first thing I learn, as I touch the chisel to the block and take an initial, tentative swing with the mallet, is that stone — especially limestone — isn't the impenetrable material I'd imagined.

I thought I'd have to hammer with all my strength to make the tiniest indentation; instead, great slices of stone are flaking off, threatening to ruin all hopes of the flat surface I'm aiming for. Apprentice masons soon learn, Clack explains, that stone is a temperamental substance that needs to be coaxed and cajoled into the right shape, not dominated with brute force.

It has its eccentricities. It can fall apart under its own weight while you're carrying it. Or water can seep in, freezing and leaving air-pockets, so that you'll be chiselling away when suddenly you hit one, and the delicate patterns you've spent the last week carving fracture into pieces and fall to the floor. What emerges from my chiselling isn't what most people would call flat.

But for someone who's famous among friends for a lack of hand-eye coordination, it's surprisingly non-terrible: you could certainly tell, by looking at it, that flatness was what I was aiming for. Unlike an office performance review, where nothing's really measurable, and where blandly content-free praise is the norm, there's a clear, indisputable goal here. I haven't met it, but that's the curious thing: it feels better to know exactly what you're aiming for, even if you miss.

Crawford sees the dwindling of manual skills as part of something bigger and more alarming: a fundamental change in how we relate to our physical stuff. As consumers, most of us no longer make things, but buy them instead; we no longer fix things, but replace them. Appliances used to be manufactured in the expectation that customers might want to tinker with them — detailed parts diagrams were often included — but these days designers try to "hide the works". Gadgets feature strange screws that can't be unscrewed using normal screwdrivers.

Some cars are designed so that all you can see once you lift the bonnet is a smooth, impenetrable surface: effectively, another bonnet. We become passive and dependent, and more easily manipulable. Our physical surroundings no longer hold our attention, and we start to succumb to what Crawford calls "virtualism" — "a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.

This is turning us into narcissists , Crawford claims: we believe that reality is what we make it. Marketers and advertisers focus on building brands, and "telling compelling stories". Managers, lacking clear yardsticks to assess the work of their subordinates or themselves, turn into therapists, concerning themselves with boosting morale or unleashing "creativity", which is spoken of like some mystical force, waiting to be tapped by brainstorming sessions and bonding weekends.

Confronting the material world brings us back to the realisation that there is an undeniable reality, and grappling with it requires us to get over our self-absorption. What you need instead is honesty and humility, and even a kind of submission.

Instead of imagining ourselves to be all-powerful, yet all the while feeling strangely powerless, making and fixing things instils both a sense of power over what you can control and honesty about what you can't. Crucial to all this is actually experiencing failure, something white-collar workers are often buffered from.

As I should have guessed, the reason is that brute force isn't the answer: clutching the chisel with both hands and driving it into the stone just drives its vibrations back into your bones; the trick is barely to hold it at all. I never quite get the hang of this — but even so, a few hours in, I can begin to appreciate something of the pleasing exhaustion that's characteristic of the work.

As early as lunchtime, a deep sense of peacefulness has settled over the workshop. It's done. Proud of that. There is, of course, a simpler way to explain the thrill Crawford felt when he set up in business as a motorcycle mechanic: that he just really, really likes bikes.

And tinkering in workshops. And vehicles with roaring engines that travel at terrific speeds — that he is, in other words, a fairly stereotypical youngish American male. There's plenty of shopfloor horseplay in the book: "I smelled something burning, and discovered my pants were on fire After a while, wrote the New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner , The Case For Working With Your Hands "begins to read like a long, self-satisfied defence of the life choices Mr Crawford has made — quitting the dreary thinktank where the girly men are, and working on bikes.

The book suddenly has a small but detectable chip on its shoulder. I think young men, when they look at the palette of possibilities presented to them Real men want to be independent and self-directed, preferably with a wrench in their hand. There's an additional risk of wallowing in nostalgia for some golden age of artisans, or of idolising those with dangerous or poorly paid jobs who themselves might far rather the comforts of desk work.

I was getting better — just very slightly — at chiselling a flat surface from a block of Portland limestone.

I'd been deeply absorbed, I was happily tired and, if the stone I'd been working on had been destined for some real-life monument or building, I'd have been able to say: look, there, that's what I did, and it's going to last.