I somewhat look forward to fixing stuff. I just fixed our furnace. Even if I need to buy a specialty tool, I'm usually better of getting the tool and learning how to do something myself.

I have a joke I like to tell: The first guy from the [HVAC|Electrician|Plumber] just comes out to get the check. Then next 1 or 2 might actually fix it.

Because I've had so many right out of votec kids come out, don't know what they're doing and don't fix the problem. I'm relieved when I answer the door and an older guy is there.

They really need to apprentice the young guys with older guys more than they do.

(I have some experience here, my brother is a master electrician in 2 states).

They would load up on young guys and keep one or two old guys. They'd always send the young guys first because they were paid about 1/5th of the amount of the old guys per hour. If they fixed things correctly, then they made more profit. If they didn't fix things, you still paid the hourly rate anyway. After the revolving technicians of various skills attempted to fix (and charge you anyway), they would eventually send in the senior guy to actually perform the repair.

Most of the repairs are easy and minor. Nowadays furnaces have circuit boards with LED lights indicating the problem. So it's mostly just replacement of a known part. So most of the time they made a lot of profit by sending the youngest/cheapest guys.

One side is the service side. This is typically non-union and employees are trained at vocational schools that specialize in some field of expertise.

The other side is the new construction side. This is typically union and employees are trained via schooling and apprenticeships provided by the union itself.

In general, the union/new construction side makes more money, but, it's harder to get into the union and you generally work less hours (and make less money) until you are a fairly senior person. The non-union/service side will make more money (and work more hours) at least initially. The service side has very high turnover of youngsters.

Some place I did. I picked it up. I kept trying. I read books, I did it. I was also raised on a farm and took wood shop and engine shop, drafting and auto-cad (and physics, chemistry, etc).

Maybe some people just have a knack for this stuff?

(Can't reply directly to this comment)

When we enjoy something, we do it often. When we do something often, we get better at it.

For example your car is acting up and the troubleshooter knows it's the fifth contact on a relay since it's the old original model 5b relay which he can tell from the sound of the clicking and he knows the fifth contact tends to corrode on the left side each spring when the humidity is higher. Give it a whack and a spray of contact cleaner and tells you to park it in the sun for an hour. Good as new.

The normal way is taking 20 or 30 years to know about a trade or just life in general and just seeing it so much you become a bit like the born troubleshooter but you'll never be as good.

So, I know my dad inspired me at a very young age, and I've been mechanically inclined as long as I can remember (I'm sure watching the This Old House, the New Yankee Workshop, The Woodwright's shop, and every other sunday morning PBS show and car show with my dad probably helped)

No, I didnt grow up on a farm. But dad DID, he was overhauling tractor motors at 10, and driving at an obscenely young age (first ticket at 12: no license).

I knew how to drive a car before I was in high school, and was playing with carbon composites at 15 (left over b2 bits, whee).

It IS a knack for these sorts of things, but also having someone around to help get you started, combined with an interest in what ever you're working on.

This is no different than how most of you learned to program. Well, I guess it is: you're not sitting on you butt while you do it :)

True, but IMO that knack has to be fostered for it to develop. If you were raised on a farm, I assume you had some guidance. I doubt that a lot of kids whose parents are software developers would go into woodworking.

I've always kind of wanted to get into woodworking (although it's hard right now since I have an apartment, not a house), but I'm not sure how to best start. Do you know of any good resources you could recommend for an adult who wants to get into that kind of thing?

Thanks! :)

If there aren't any, it's the same as learning programming - pick a small project and look for how-tos (like this breadbox, for example: http://www.am-wood.com/nov97/bread.html) and have at it. Work your way up to more complicated things once you've got some skills and tools under your belt.

I wasn't raised doing a lot of around-the-house stuff, but in the past five years I've learned to do everything from recaulking a tub and rewiring lamps to fixing bicycles and repairing vintage rangefinder cameras.

I buy tools on craigslist and learn the steps online. Sometimes there's an unintended consequence to deal with (water spraying out of the sink, burned chicken, stripped set screws) that forums, skillshares, and hackerspaces are great at helping with.

None of this makes for a vocation, and I'm not advocating that people learn welding from eHow. But there's a lot to be learned from 'do it yourself' rather than 'do it for me'.

I try to force myself to learn something new before I go do something for entertainment. I will watch one MIT video lecture on physics or something to that effect, or research something that I am curious about. Then when I am done I can go game or watch something mindless if I choose so.

It makes it hard when I have to explain to people that I am self employed and I do about 5-10 different things...just depends on what is paying...most people just don't understand.

I agree that outsourcing and manufacturing automation has had an effect on the size of our skilled labor workforce. But let us not forget that our underfunded schools are another part of the problem.

Sigh. At what level of funding will you finally consider it adequate?

(hey downvoters -- that's what's happening to my kid's school. It's a little personal)

From 2006 when I bought my home to today, my school taxes are up over 60%. This year, the school wants a 6% increase. The library district 25%. My pay has been frozen for 3 years.

Of course I live in New York, where the teacher's union essentially governs the place. During those timeframes the local schools have gotten worse by just about every measure. So the technique of paying 20% of the teachers $100k+ isn't working.

Or are you one of the people that counts a reduction of the proposed increase as a "cut", so even though you're getting more than last year, it's lower than what you asked for, so you consider it a cut?

Our school district has had to cut teachers for the last few years(I think 5 by now). They do it based on seniority, within each endorsement. Now, there are no teachers with less than 14 years of teaching experience in the district.

So, a 2% increase in funding is typically a cut in "real" terms, even if inflation were under 2% (which it isn't), the grab bag of costs for municipalities has a lot of healthcare and very little consumer electronics, so inflation of school district costs of typically much higher than 2%.

So, basically, yeah, this is not unusual, not 1-in-a-million, go to your local school board meetings and you will likely find them struggling with budget cuts and layoffs.

You seem to be perpetuating the idea that class size determines educational quality, and it ain't true. Indeed, it seems that many people take class size as a proxy for the quality. But it's false.

If you go looking for actual data on the relationship between size and educational achievement, you'll find that it's pretty inconclusive. Nobody has been able to show a strong correlation linking smaller classes with better learning. The one exception is a study showing that in the specific population of "at-risk kids" (meaning, those who are probably not getting educational support at home), having smaller classes does help. But for the mainstream, nobody has been able to prove that investing in more teachers to shrink the size of classes has any positive impact.

Continuing to harp on class size is part of the problem. It wastes money, preventing it from being employed in areas where it could do real good.

That's not a class size or teacher problem, that's a furniture problem.

and their preparation time has been eliminated

I call BS. Does somebody come home with them and prevent them from preparing. As a manager and software developer, I spend a fair amount of my own time researching a prepping. Why should teachers not do the same?

7 classes per term, average of 40 students per class = 280 students total. There are 7 classes per day of 45 minutes each, with 5 minutes between classes and a 30 minute lunch. Teachers have to meet with students before and/or after school and monitor students between classes, so they're typically at school and busy for 8 hours or more per day with no breaks except maybe lunch. You try locking yourself in a building with 1000 or more shouting young teenagers for 8 hours straight without so much as a bathroom break.

If a teacher assigns a homework assignment every day and spends three hours per day (at home) grading assignments, then each student gets less than one minute of attention per assignment. Every student has his or her own points of confusion on the subject matter, which cannot be addressed in just one minute per day, and using class time to broadly address the questions of a few students slows down the students who don't have the same questions.

Notice I didn't include any time for designing lesson plans and presentations, writing grant proposals, creating assignments, or meeting with parents, let alone spending time with their families (which often enough just doesn't happen).

Regarding "furniture problems:" desks are a fixed size, they have to be spaced apart enough for students and teachers to reach them without tripping, and the classroom also needs presentation space at the front, a teacher's desk, and storage space. Fire codes specify maximum occupancy limits for rooms. There's only so much room available for desks.

Maybe you have to see the combined exasperation and exhaustion of an overworked and underpaid teacher to appreciate the level of decay present in our public school systems. This is an area where averages and statistics are misleading.

We're spending enough money, so if you're not getting what you want, you need to talk to the folks who are in charge of turning that money into decent education.

And they (the state legislature) is trying to cut all funding for our school secretary and remove any janitorial services. Because, apparently, they don't realize that the secretaries actually run the damn place.

I'm not sure where you are, but my experience is that most of the teachers are pretty good and care for the kids. We've got one that we wish we could ease out the door, but we've got a few that are just great. That is, if we get to keep them, because their hours will be cut and the district reshuffled.

I didn't suggest otherwise.

I said that in CA, like many other places in the US, we've been increasing spending on public education for decades and haven't gotten any benefit from that extra money.

It may well be that this money never made it to the classroom and that the classroom is being cut while "the black hole" is being protected.

My point is that enough money is going into "the system" as a whole. You're saying "enough money" isn't going where it's needed. That's a different problem, one that won't be solved by adding money.

Doesn't it bother you that your kids are being used as an excuse to line someone's pockets? (And no, I don't mean tax payers.)

It's not the food service, their contract is really crappy. I'd be happy to cut it, but there are enough kids on free lunch that it's really important. It's not the teachers, they keep getting cut. It's not the administrators, there aren't that many of them, and they've been cutting right along with the teachers. And the administrative load doesn't get smaller, since there are an ever multiplying number of federal compliance issues. It's not maintenance, as they don't have the resources they need to keep the aging infrastructure going. They could double their staff for a year and still not get through stuff. It's not transportation, they're getting hit by fuel costs. It's not the secretaries, they're getting hit too. The text books, meh, most of them are pretty old. Maybe it's technology, but that's a separate levy and a different pool of money.

We've got old buildings, one should have been closed years ago. That could save a teacher or two per year, but there's community pressure to keep it open.

Frankly, we spend less on education here per student per year than I would spend to send a kid to daycare for the same time. And they're expected to learn enough to compete in the modern world.

Are you confusing the amount of money spent with the amount of benefit delivered?

I note that you're looking at the school level and you're guessing at spending.

Let's look at it from the other side. Suppose that you wanted to educate 25 kids. Would it cost more than $187k? I ask because $7,500 * 25 is $187,500.

High schools used to concentrate on teaching young adults what they needed to know in order to survive independently. At some point they stopped doing that, perhaps because they're still trying to teach them to read. But that seems like a problem.

Federal and state legislators can pass an unfunded mandate ("I will not stand by while we ignore these kids"), do a photo op, then cut the funding going to local districts and take credit for balancing the state budget.

I'm not advocating eugenics or anything, just pointing out that after all the rhetoric and grandstanding, it's the school districts that wind up eating it.

[1] agenda - A list or program of things to be done or considered.