I also work with students, both high school and college and professional. As much credit as people can be given, you also need to give them no benefit of the doubt. I got to hear (I was on the other side of a set wall) a
line set run this week. It was a professional set construction/installation/production company that was installing scenery. People, in a rush, will forget all rules of
safety and professionalism.
But isn't it safe to say that someone giving them a list of rules or pointing to a poster with a list of rules on hanging on the wall wouldn't have prevented that?
In my experience, the safest environment when lots of things are moving on
stage is that I know what's happening on the
grid, what's happening on the
weight rail, what's happening on the floor, and what's happening in any scissor lifts. Each person watching out for the
safety of their actions and the actions of the people around them goes much further than any poster on the wall.
My students are smart, and they also know that I make mistakes just like they do, and they're prepared to
point anything unsafe out to me just like they would expect me to do for them.
My other big problem with lists of
safety rules is that not only do people not pay attention to them, but people get the impression that things that
aren't on the list are permissible. That's how "No Food or Drink" gets added to the list -- a common sense item that one person thought was alright and now it's a defacto policy and detracts from the policies people actually need to pay attention to, such as making certain your wrench is tethered to you.
The only place I really like to have a list of policies is in our
venue spec packet, and that's intended less to control the conduct of people and more to give them a
clear, certain idea of functionally what can or can not be accommodated in our space.
Time and time again, the more responsible student groups I work with are the ones where each person has a sense of responsibility and sense of owning every action of theirs. That versus the groups where the adult leaders dictate exactly what students can or can not do -- those groups are always awful to work with because each person is used to having someone else think for them about what's acceptable behavior and they assume no responsibility for their actions -- they have no sense of ownership for their actions because they've not been given the freedom to think for themselves.
People who are treated like they're dumb will act dumb. People who are treated like they're smart will act smart. The longer people act dumb, the dumber they will be. The longer people act smart, the wiser they will become.
Wisdom comes from screwing up. It comes from making mistakes, seeing others make mistakes, and hearing about others who made mistakes. To become a "Pro", there's no substitute for working around the same obstacles over and over again. Being a "Pro" means you've sat in front of the same problem enough times that you know exactly what worked for you the times you've walked into that problem before and even more importantly it's knowing what didn't work for you.
I'm not saying everyone should go set their theatres on fire and that's how they'll become professional stagehands -- what I'm saying is that when people have the freedom to feel smart and intelligent, they acquire wisdom (albeit while also screwing up now and then), and then they feel a sense of ownership for and responsibility for their actions.
A crew that's treated like they're stupid will act stupid, and stupid is why rule lists seem like a really good idea at the time -- each time a stupid mistake is made, a rule is made telling people not to do that stupid thing. A foggy list of obscure rules later and the two points that were really important at the top of the list got lost in the other thirty rules about nonsense.
Smart people don't ensure there will never be a workplace injury, but if someone gets hurt when a bunch of smart people are working on a job, it'll be because of an
honest mistake instead of
stupid one. It'll be "I didn't notice that
lens was broken when I picked it up and it sliced into my
hand" instead of "I didn't know when the coach sent me 40' in the air in a
scissor lift on the football field during a really windy day was a bad idea."
Student #1 who sliced their
hand on a broken
lens was a student who made an
honest mistake I did have to
send to the hospital for stitches.
Student #2 was
this guy who made a stupid mistake and he's dead.
Honest mistakes will happen every day and there's no list of rules that will prevent them, from someone reading the wrong
circuit number off of the
light plot and plugging a
fixture into the wrong
circuit to someone dropping something heavy on their
foot. Stupid mistakes happen, and again no list of rules will prevent them, but they more typically range from someone using a
nail gun to secure an electrical
cord to a
flat to someone not putting on their fall arrest gear when they're climbing
truss.
If the odds of probability say that people will make mistakes while they are at work in my
theatre, any day of the week I'd prefer they be honest mistakes by someone smart rather than reckless, stupid mistakes made by someone who thought they could get away with something.
You give people the
power to think for themselves and own their actions and they'll impress you. If you're always thinking for everyone around you, the wheels will fall off of the
wagon pretty quickly as soon as you step out of the room for a few minutes.