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Re: Help: How do we get a teacher to help? (was: Help)
Ask any teacher at your school, and I mean any. Since I've been on the team we've had a computer science teacher, two math teachers, and now two special ed. teachers be our main sponsors. Teachers don't need to know anything about engineering, or anything with technology even, they just have to be willing to help you with paperwork and represent you (so they do need some enthusiasm for what you're doing, even if they don't understand it).
As others have mentioned, check on if district employees can assist your team. This includes office secretaries, administrators, and even janitors. In our district the team must be headed by a teacher, but any district employee can be present for meetings and travel with to competitions.
For build season, gather a large group of teachers to help, since I'm assuming a teacher must be present for meetings at school (that's the way it is for us). A single teacher very easily gets burnt out. Ask if teachers would be willing to do just one or two meetings, or even part of a meeting (if you run a 5 hour meeting, two teachers splitting the shifts). We basically tell all the teachers we ask that they just have to unlock the rooms, grade papers and write lesson plans for a few hours while we work, then lock the rooms when we leave (and this is all they have to do).
We've had this problem for a while now (we're on our 4th generation of teacher sponsors in 7 years), and this solution has worked quite well for our team. If the students in charge are willing to do alot of the work, being a club/team sponsor is really not that large of a burden.
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FRC Team 498 (Peoria, AZ), Student: 2004 - 2007
FRC Team 498 (Peoria, AZ), Mentor: 2008 - 2011
FRC Team 167 (Iowa City, IA), Mentor: 2012 - 2014
FRC Team 2662 (Tolleson, AZ), Mentor: 2014 - Present
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