On Getting Hammered

As Jen mentioned on her blog, I finished my hammer yesterday, after an extremely frustrating week of working on it. The FAA has certain activities that we, as AMT students, MUST do. The school decided to find a way for us to do those activities in such a way that when we're done with them, we have something useful to show for it. The solution: make the students build a hammer. The project seems cool, and I was actually pretty excited to get to it. Here's the problem with the hammer project, though. Some of the students in my class (including me) have never really handled tools in any meaningful way. We all, I think, assumed that there would be some instructions or exercises to get us up to speed on using tools before we were given the task of building a hammer. You know, something to ease us into the process, instead of just dropping us cold into a situation where competency with tools was a necessity. That, unfortunately, wasn't the case. So when they handed us a blueprint and some materials and said, "Here, build a hammer," some of us were dreadfully unprepared. What made it more frustrating was that they then told us, "Oh, and we're going to charge you 4 points off your project grade everytime you screw up and have to start over on any part of the hammer." So we were struggling along, using some tools (including a drill press) for the first time, and trying not to botch anything because we didn't want to get docked. Suffice it to say, I screwed up the head of my hammer and had to "buy" a new hunk of steel and start over. But, in the end, the hammer got finished, and I learned how to use some tools in the process. As Jenny also mentioned, my final exam for Phase 1 is next Thursday, which means the following Monday we're on to Phase 2. I'm optimistic that the quality of my AMT education will improve at that point, as the instructors will be back on familiar ground (the guy who used to teach Phase 1 got fired last semester, so the rest of the instructors had to step in and fill the void despite having never taught the material before). One more year...