Shop Program Bids Farewell To Longtime Teacher Gary Clement To Retire

Gary Clement spends his days bouncing between a room that reeks of the tang of melted metal and one perfumed with the fresh forest scent of shaved wood.

As the industrial arts teacher at Mead Middle School, he has spent 27 years teaching seventh- and eighth-graders wood and metal working, the inner workings of small engines, minihouse construction and mechanical drawing.

But after Clement’s last day June 13, Mead’s shop program will never be the same.

“He is literally not replaceable,” said Mead counselor Ed Merz. “They’re not training that traditional vocational education kind of teacher any more.”

The new industrial arts program will offer metal and wood working in addition to technological training, like computer graphics and design.

“I think it’ll be a good program. I’m jealous that it’s my time to retire when all this stuff is coming in,” said Clement, 58. Then he stopped to think.

“But it’s hard to let go of the past. I’m torn between doing what I’m doing now for another 20 years and bringing in technology.”

He talked about a class project that day - creating a small toolbox from a flat piece of metal.

“When you lay out a box, you can see how the ends fold,” he explained. One girl had initially folded it wrong. “She’ll never do that again. If you do it on a computer, it doesn’t mean as much.”

Clement’s teaching career started when he was laid off from an airline mechanic job with Alaska Airlines in 1970.

“In the back of my mind, I’d always wanted to be a shop teacher,” he remembered. So he went to school for a few years and then became Mead Middle School’s shop teacher in 1974.

He marvels at how things have changed.

When he started at Mead, Clement would pick up seven or eight kids on his way to work and open the shop until school started. Some kids drove tractors to school. “They were farm kids. It was a farm school,” he said.

Though the student body was half the size it is today, Clement said he has always had large classes.

“Kids like shop,” he explained. “Here they have more freedom to move around. The pressure for grades is not there.”

That lack of class structure has provided him opportunities for unique interactions. “As an elective teacher, he can reach a certain type of hands-on kid others can’t,” Merz said. “He has made a difference in some of these kids, helping them hang in there with school through their success in shop and his interest in them.”

It is those relationships Clement said he’ll miss the most.

“There are some awful nice kids, and some with lots of problems. But they keep you young,” he said. “I like teaching them skills, showing them they can do things.”

Clement runs into former students just about everywhere now. They are the parents of current students. They are even his co-workers.

Mead eighth-grade English teacher Karen Petty had Clement as a teacher in the early ‘80s. He remembers her excitement about welding. She remembers his compassion.

“I broke a welding mask once, and I was so afraid I was going to have to pay for it,” she said. “But he was so understanding - especially with those of us who are totally inept.”

Given a typical class period - Clement yelling to be heard over blowers, pounding, drilling, the clang of huge sheets of metal being cut and teenage girls shrieking - you might think he’s retiring to give his voice a rest.

“Hey! I want to see people picking up tools and sweeping,” he calls to students as they lethargically take up the brooms.

But it’s simpler than that.

“I’m tired. I just want to spend time with my grandkids,” he said. “It’s just time.”