Chainsaw Man Visits Hurley Middle School

Kevin Hurley Middle School recently hosted its first school assembly. The special guest was artist Mike Higgins, whose work is certainly not routine. 

Using several chainsaws of different sizes, a blowtorch, a sander and paints (blue and white to be exact), Higgins created a Warrior out of a giant pine log.  To watch this transpire in front of me, and the rest of the audience was quite a sight. Fortunately, I could see him fairly close up and could clearly see he was totally into what he was doing.

"How many times are you going to see this in your life?" Higgins asked the amazed students in the audience.

In addition to doing performance art, Higgins talked about his school days and earlier career in a corporate setting that led up to teaching some extremely valuable lessons to the young crowd.

Read a lot! He reads a book a week. He chooses many different subjects to read in order to help build his vocabulary and educate himself. Being a speaker he feels this is very helpful in gaining great confidence to be in front of an audience. Public speaking can be hard. However, when you have the confidence and know your subject, as he says, you will feel better about speaking. 

Also, he pointed out that education is very important and that kids should really pay attention in school.  Find something you really like to do and work at it. You may not do anything with it right away but it could be something that will come up again someday.  Perseverance pays off.  During his sculpting the Warrior, he did run into trouble, but kept going.

This was a perfect way to start off school events. It was cool but most importantly, inspiring. Thank you to the school's PTO for making this possible.