Thursday, September 2, 2010

Week one: In the book

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The first week of school is over. An abbreviated four day week, followed by a four day holiday weekend. I brought home enough work to fill most of the weekend..... amazing how many tree's we managed to kill in such a short time.

The crew? Interesting bunch, with our usual wide spread of abilities, attitudes, and backgrounds. Three have already elected to leave our program, one turned down an opportunity to leave us for a 'better' program, and one from that 'better program' is trying to get into ours. At the beginning of the summer our roster was 57 strong. By the time school started it was 51. Right now it is 47 and holding, weakly. It will be another week or so till the number firms up, but by then... God help the new student who shows up. They will need it... as they will begin already two weeks behind. Two weeks is enough to wipe out a semester in our program.... we are a busy place.

In four days we managed to blow through several metric tons of BS, paperwork, required safety training, and other assorted efforts to negate any actual education. Today we had our first real theory lesson, no matter how brief, and tossed their teenage butts out into the shop to begin task work. Nothing really difficult yet, but one ID task is designed for my partner and I to stretch their brains out and see what they know... and how hard we can push each of them. It's hard on us, but teaches us a LOT about our students, quickly.

Right now, I'm in recovery phase. A hot meal, a hot shower, and a cold adult beverage.



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