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November 20, 2013

"Not a lot of questions about wood on that test."

He was right. Dead right, and I mean that every which way.
He knew, by instinct, and training, and custom, and experience, intergenerationally, exactly how to build a single-family house in the State of his birth. And that knowledge, experience, and desire was worthless to him, because there's not a lot of questions about wood on that test... Sippican Cottage: I'm Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets In

Posted by gerardvanderleun at November 20, 2013 1:06 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

I know the Mass. Building Code exam well. I graduated with a degree in business administration from Umass. and decided to go into construction. I studied the Mass. Code and took the exam. The most difficult exam I have ever taken. I passed but most did not. Subsequently I took a night time position teaching aspiring contractors the Mass. building code, and techniques for passing the exam. You are right, there is nothing about wood in the course. I taught the formulas and operations for finding the volume of cylinders, workings of the Pythagorean Theorem, metric measurement, and a host of other topics only tangentially related to building. Many of my students balked when I started into the math sections, not knowing they would be tested on such topics. Not once did I teach or was ever tested the layout of hip rafters, fastener selection, leveling techniques, material options, etc.

Posted by: tripletap at November 21, 2013 5:29 AM

America was built by people who never took such an exam. Now America is being wrecked by the people who created these exams.

Posted by: pst314 at November 21, 2013 10:46 AM

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