This is actually why I avoided teaching classes. It seems to me that a single technician against 125 pianos can't be doing much piano maintenance if he's having to deal with lesson plans and teaching classes, and then still has to moonlight to make ends meet. The only way I could have imagined trying to make it work was as a work-study program, with one kid starting as a freshman every year, and so, ideally, you've got the older kids well-enough trained to help with training the newbies. But I tended to find that college students are too busy to rely on for this work. I know I was. Once I got to a certain level of skill and ability, it was tough to make myself work at the university for $10/hour (none of the other work study kids made that much) when I could make 3 times that outside. And then, when I was the boss, my admin only let me pay the kids minimum wage, and by that time the private market rate for tuning was almost 10 times that much. You really open a can of worms when you start teaching kids how to do piano work in the college setting. Jeff ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul T Williams To: CAUTlist Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 6:01 PM Subject: [CAUT] students productivity Hi all, I have 6 students this semester which I was able to "split" into to classes of three each two times/week. I have no real way to teach 6 at once as I am not a lecturer, but a hands-on teaching kind of guy, the shop is small, can't keep 2 eyes on 12 eyes and hands etc. This sounded good at first, but now teaching everything twice, it's becoming a pain; and it's hard to think of what each class has learned. I'm trying to arrange it to teach the same thing each time. but I forget "little" things for each of them that might be on their quizzes. March 4 is quiz #2 over regulation processes/downbearning vs. upbearing, agraffes/aliquotes/capo, etc....but who did I tell things to? Many of my quiz tests are from vocal instruction. None of them ever take notes!! Nor have they ever!! The question is that I am having trouble with is that I think I am getting 4 man-hours of work from each class, but sadly, I'm getting about 1/2 man-hour per 1 hour class. I guess this is a backfire. I can re-bush a half a set of front rail bushings in the time it takes them to do a dozen. At least they are learning something in the process. I'm sorry I split this class in half!! Anyone else do this? Best, Paul -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100211/b7740b40/attachment-0001.htm>
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