Mentors Input

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by southbend

For those of you, mentors, with shops - Does your school and or district support you with machinery, hand tools etc. to aid in building and teaching students real world skills?
I am noticing a trend in students needing to be micro-management, more than i've ever noticed previously. Is this due to the fast paced world of FIRST or is it a trend in society?

im not bashing, just ranting.

For us, somewhat. The school has provided some money (a bulk sum for whatever we needed to buy) to purchase equipment, but pretty much everything in the shop has been obtained by the team (primarily by the mentors).

As for micro-managing, i think it has more to do with experience than anything else. The less experience a team member has, the more they need you hovering over them. Being an all-girls team, we may have a fairly unique situation - almost all of our students come in not knowing how to use even the simplest tools. They didn't grow up following their dad's around the house fixing things, building bird houses or pinewood derby cars for cub scouts. So for us at least, it's a lot of micro managing and 1-1 work with the students to educate them in the tools and techniques... but once they learn that, we can start to back off and let them work things out for themselves. After a year or two on the team, we actually expect the students to be able to work autonomously, at least for short (1-2 hours) periods of time.