Training.
One of the things I do from time to time is train. I’m probably one of the better Robotics trainers in the biz, and lately I’ve been training in marking/engraving lasers.
The lasers are actually pretty simple, because at base they’re really just printers. You draw something, assign it a set of laser parameters, and burn. There’s a little more to it, but not much.
Yesterday I trained three very nice people, a fortysomething girl (Who looked twenty to me, I guess I’m just showing my age) a guy my age, and an elderly Asian lady.
It is hardest for me to watch people stumble and not be able to find the things I tell them to click on etc., hard to not take their hand and guide them to the thing I want done, but they have to be able to do so myself. I spend a day doing this training, and it is bloody frustrating, because I basically sit on my hands.
Still, it’s nice to end a day knowing these people will make it on their own because I made them do all the work.
I received my early training in mechanics from my GrandFather. His method of instruction was to point a what needed to be done and watch. If you were about to go off the rails he would offer “I don’t think I would do it that way” and walk off.
It was up to you to get the correct method needed from him. Seems to have worked for me.
It is hard to watch mistakes without taking command to correct them, but that is how people learn.
Good on you giving instruction.
My Dad wasn’t much of a teacher. He was a mechanic & a perfectionist; he also didn’t have the patience to watch somebody fuck up & not step in. He taught me a lot of basics, such as 4-stroke cycles, for instance; I think I knew “suck-squeeze-bang-blow” by the time I was 6 or so. I learned a lot, but mostly by watching. He’d tell me what he was doing & why, but whenever he let me do something, he’d step in & some point & just do it. Damned good man, but not built to be a teacher.
That is one of the hardest parts of teaching. I generally have to stay back with hands behind my back and wait for them to ask a question. It is hard not to just do it, but then they wouldn’t learn. Doesn’t help that the machine has many pages of parameters for programming. Takes time to learn where all the submenus are.
Ten years ago I took a CNC operating class. I was one of two paying for it out of my own pocket. Two Chicom “females” were taking the class on the Chicom Gov’t dime. They both reeked of garlic and BO, barely spoke any English, shoved their way by force to the front of all demonstrations, copied the instructor word for word and memorized the controller commands by rote. Both failed the class spectacurlarly and looked absolutely terror stricken when the rankings were posted. I expect they had to walk home or pay their own way. I wonder if either are alive today.
FYI-I got a job operating a Bridgeport E-Z Trac machine within a week, I was laid off due to Boeing cancelling an order 14 months later. It was just about the most fun 14 months I ever had. I was already taking a union pension from my “career” so losing the CNC job wasn’t a disaster. To me. The shop manager was almost in tears. I actually felt sorry for him. I had been laid off and fired form jobs before, but that was the gentlest layoff I’ve ever experienced.
Running that machine was like playing with electric trains 8 hrs a day and getting paid for it.