At Bucks high school, guitar-building hooks kids on STEM

I cover schools in the region with a particular focus on innovation and trends. The sound of guitars in Matt Peitzman’s tech-ed classroom at Pennridge High School isn’t a wailing Hendrix-style solo or crushing power chords, but rather the steady grind of kids sanding, cutting, and clamping together pieces of maple or cherry wood, slowly hand-crafting the instruments of every teenager’s musical dreams. “It’s hard at first if you don’t know what you’re doing, but once you get the hang of it, it’s fairly easy,” said 18-year-old senior Brian Kennedy, one of 18 students making their own guitars in a fast-growing, popular course at the Bucks County high school. Before making a guitar, Kennedy crafted a ukulele in Peitzman’s class two years ago, though the only string instrument he has ever played is the cello. But then, most of his classmates don’t know how to play a guitar; nor does their teacher. And that’s not really the point of the guitar-building class, unlike any other in the Philadelphia region. The Pennridge class uses the STEM Guitar curriculum, developed by a group of college professors a decade ago to use guitar-making as a fun way to hook kids on learning the basics...

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