Five minutes with Assistant Principal David Reed-Nordwall

Five minutes with Assistant Principal David Reed-Nordwall

Legos are shiny, colorful blocks that turn the impossible into a 3-D reality. School is a place of learning for the doorways to opportunity open up. The two aren’t usually affiliated together, but for Assistant Principal David Reed-Nordwall, they click perfectly. Reed-Nordwall weaves Lego-building concepts into the master schedule, which is a spreadsheet of every teacher’s classes.

A batman glider built by David Reed-Nordwall and his daughters.
A Lego race car built by Reed-Nordwall. Photos provided by Michal Ruprecht.

“I think they fit very well with my dream to build, I always wanted to create things … I have to make a master schedule and that master schedule runs the entire building and a lot of the people don’t think of it as very interesting, but it’s a puzzle, just like Legos. The pieces have to fit and it represents the entire school, so the classes you go to everyday, the teachers and what they teach, when they teach and how they teach it is all represented by that schedule, which is in essence a really really intricate Lego block,” Reed-Nordwall said.

A Lego car created by Reed-Nordwall.
A Lego set from The Hobbit series.

Not only does he incorporate Legos into his job, but his love for the building blocks also tie into his hobbies. In particular, Reed-Nordwall’s building experience applies to exterior design projects, like redoing his front porch from wood.

“I like to build stuff, so right now my house is my hobby where I try to make things and, you know, fix things around the house. That’s fun, it’s good,” Reed-Nordwall said .

Reed-Nordwall started his Lego creations when he was 6, and continues the tradition nowadays with his three daughters.

“I love Legos, I try not to collect them because I think they should be played with, but … some of them you just have to collect because they’re like sculptures. Other than that, you know, I don’t really collect,” Reed-Nordwall said. “It was some of my favorite winter afternoons with fire in the fireplace and just building massive Lego sets with the girls and then they would take them up to their room and play with them and it’d be great.”

Q & A: Discussing Legos

NP: What was your favorite Lego and what was your least favorite?

Reed- Nordwall: They’re all about the same, like they’re spaceman stuff. My favorite was the plate you’d put on it had craters on it, it was grey. It’s funny I’m remembering this, it was grey and it had two little craters and I think I liked to play and pretend the spacemen were jumping over, but they didn’t really have design sets like they do now, when they’re really intricate, when they started to come out. I think there was an X-Wing Fighter that was pretty cool. My least favorite was just when they became just a pile of Lego sand then it was just a bunch of stuff because it wasn’t as nearly as cool as now, so they weren’t useful.

NP: How many (Legos) do you have, right now?

Reed- Nordwall: The most incredible thing that happened is that they came out with, it was Lego Friends, so they kind of started marketing toward girls, which they have never done and it just exploded. So my daughter started getting into them and they have little veterinarians and a barber shop and some other cool stuff. But, they transferred quickly from that over to the Hobbit stuff, and so now it’s amazing. My daughter has Smaug and we have the Hogwarts Castle and they got all the dwarf kingdoms and stuff, so. My daughters are doing really well, they got a lot of cool Legos.