Dimmers in the scene shop??

[shiben]

... If you want, and are a good teacher, maybe you can talk to some of the kids in the industrial tech (or whatever they call it today) classes to see if they might be interested in helping out.

My school actually dropped all forms of shop/industrial tech/ect in favor of "life skills" (home ec.). It wasnt a particularly difficult class to pass, seeing as that if you could avoid lighting a stove on fire or drowning a fake baby, you were set. However, lord forbid we learn how to use a saw or a drill or something. Those are dangerous, and thus not fit for high school students to learn how to use.

 

[mstaylor]

What the heck are some school system thinking. We are dumbing down kids and "protecting" them to their own detriment. I am not supposed to hire kids under 18 as stagehands but hire 16s all the time. They can learn at that age and it builds a good work ethic. Does your school system at least have a tech school?

 

[sk8rsdad]

What the heck are some school system thinking.

 

[photoatdv]

I'm sure I've posted this one before... but we had a teacher my first year on the crew have the tech theatre class (not the club) pull a backdrop down to return to the school we borrowed it from. However, he felt it was too dangerous to let students on the loading gallery, so he simply didn't reweight that line. Opps... kid flying through the air...

(It's okay to laugh... everyone was okay... well except for that lineset ;-))

 

[bull]

What the heck are some school system thinking. We are dumbing down kids and "protecting" them to their own detriment. I am not supposed to hire kids under 18 as stagehands but hire 16s all the time. They can learn at that age and it builds a good work ethic. Does your school system at least have a tech school?

We don't have a tech theatre class. There are auto shop, and engineering classes though at the Career Academy. We have some techies in the Advanced Theatre Class, and we get to work, but nobody teaches us, we just kind of have to teach each other.

I recruited two freshmen off the drumline today. It was extremely simple, something I do often. All I had to do was work in the theatre while they were practicing. They were intrigued by the ridiculous amounts of completely unsafe free climbing I was doing. One of them wants to do rigging, and he is a good candidate, and the other I have worked with before, and I will probably have him just working as a general stage technician doing some of this and that.

 

[midgetgreen11]

My high school doesn't have any technical theatre class. The "Theatre Production" class we have in our Program of Studies never has enough interest to run, and only covers the design aspects and not the physical technical aspects of theatre. Everything we learn is from personal research or from prior students.

 

[shiben]

Our high school had a technology center, which is where all the kids who were not going to be going to college tended to go, so that they could build job skills. If you wanted to get enough of the correct classes to get into a college, you needed to stay out of the technology center, which required half of a day, 4 days a week. Those guys could take welding, car repair, carpentry, etc. I was in a "robotics" class for pre-engineering students. I got really good at using AutoCAD to draw things that we sent off to get milled/drilled/whatever needed to be done. Actually, the most unfortunate part of it was that I was trained on CADD before I ever even heard of hand drafting, so when I started doing theater design and thats all we were allowed I struggled (and had to fudge it on a particularly complicated one, did it all in Vectorworks and then traced it, teacher noticed because mine was the only one that was done correctly, asked why and I told him, he laughed for a week and commended me for my resourcefulness.) But yeah, in Jr. High we had a "shop" class that utilized "computer based learning strategies", which is code for "do nothing except take quizzes on a computer and make a CNC mill turn out 8" long plastic objects that are cylinders (guess what a bunch of jr. high boys make? guesses anyone?) and have the only tool in the class because a student uses it". Fortunately, my dad had tools that were real *ghasp*, I could have cut my hand off from the age of 5 (Not allowed to use the compound miter saw without supervision for a while), and I had a model railroad from the age of 12, which built up my skills such as measuring, cutting from a standard, painting, etc. But yeah, school districts in suburbia seem to be cutting back in favor of "safety" at the expense of education (I just found out that my HS theater apparently has had the table saw taken away due to safety issues, no idea how they are gonna learn how to use one safely any more)