Yesterday, a friend emailed me:
Did you see Tom Gallagher’s editorial, “Lessons of Grace,” on page 9 of the May 2017 QST on teaching electronics and amateur radio in schools? Any thoughts on his ideas?
Here was my reply:
I tried twice to set up a ham radio class/club in a middle school. Both were successful in that they did introduce the kids to ham radio and electronics, but both efforts failed in that neither of them resulted in any of the kids getting their licenses.
The first time I tried this was at a charter school. We did a bunch of things like set up an antenna and made contacts, and I taught them other stuff that they needed to know to pass the test. At the end of the semester, there were two kids who were interested enough and who had learned enough to pass the test, but their parents never took them to the exam session! There was no ham radio club there the next semester.
The second time I tried this, I was actually paid by the Ann Arbor Public Schools to provide a ham radio club for a bunch of middle schoolers. We did some of the same things. I set up a station a couple of times and we made contacts. I also had them build no-solder, code practice oscillators.
This was an after-school activity, and predictably attendance dwindled throughout the semester. By the end of the semester, there was one kid who could have passed the test, but again, he got no support from his parents, and I don’t think he ever got a license.
In both cases, I got little or no support from the school, aside from a little bit of money from the Ann Arbor Public School District.
I learned two big lessons from my experiences. First, for this to be successful at all, you have to have the participation of not only the school, but the parents. In both cases, the schools only minimally participated and the parents not at all. Not getting the school and the parents involved really dooms an effort like this to failure.
Second, I’m not really cut out to work with kids. At times, I could barely keep the class under control. That’s probably partly due to my lack of training in classroom management, but whatever the reason, I just don’t have the skill set to work with middle school kids or kids that are there just to be there. I have no desire to try this again with kids of any age.
As a final comment, I’ll note that I just swapped email with Tom Gallagher, NY2RF about this article. He wrote that the sessions, “culminated in administering the test to five students,” yet he only notes that Shui Se Phoe passed the test. I asked about the other four, and he said, “The others came close, but the overwhelming amount of brute memorization interfered with their school obligations.”
That’s fair enough, but I don’t think that he gives enough weight to parental involvement. He never mentions this in his editorial, and I think it’s as critical as all the other factors. Kids need the support of their parents to both get their licenses and to then become active radio amateurs.
Dave New, N8SBE says
Middle school seems too young as a target group. As one teacher put it, “Middle school is a containment action.” Hard to get a commitment from the kids, and they aren’t organized enough to take on something and be responsible for it, with or without help.
High school is more likely a better target, but these days, you are then competing directly with computer labs and other modern high-tech distractions.
To complain that we need more “school” involvement is not quite on target. It’s actually the involvement of a teacher that is required, likely a science or electric shop teacher. in my case, it was our electric shop teacher that not only had the skills to herd kids, but he found space in a converted tool crib for the station, and helped with the wiring/cabling and placing a vertical antenna on the roof of the building on a push up mast.
The other helpful thing about being in high school was that some of the older students had their driver’s license and one had access to their folks’ station wagon to provide transportation when it came time to travel 30 miles to the nearest FCC quarterly examination point in Nashville. The shop teacher arranged for us to get that particular Tuesday off, so we could go. Meetings were after school in the electric shop, and we got rides home from some of the other students.
The involvement I got from my parents came in the form of getting a microscope for Christmas, and later a chemistry set, followed by a 100-in-1 electrical kit (with TWO transistors!) and finally a Radio Shack short wave portable radio, where I discovered SSB that sounded like Donald Duck with a head cold. I managed to put together a BFO using a 455 KHz transformer-base oscillator (found in a circuits book in the school library — this was in a time before the Internet), and with a lot of patience, I could decode some of the SSB, and listen to CW. By then, I was starting high school.
The principal announced one day that the radio club was meeting after school, and that attendees could get a radio license. I thought they were talking about getting a commercial license so I could be a DJ (as my older brother had been many years prior), but found out that it was for ham radio, instead. I stuck with it, and managed to get my Novice license, which was administered by the father of one of the other club members (he had turned his dad into a ham, as one other member had — -they were both rewarded with Drake 4-lines, purchased by their respective dads, but mainly used by their sons and their friends in the club — nice!)
My folks let me put an antenna in the attic (later my brother gifted me a short tower, and I put a home brew bamboo-spreader quad on it). I bought a Hallicrafters SX-99U receiver with outboard Heathkit Q-Multiplier from a club member, and borrowed a Knight Kit T-60 transmitter from another. With the purchase of a Dow key relay and some Novice crystals at Allied Radio in Nashville, I was on the air on 40 and 15 meters. My dad gave up his home ‘office’ in the attached garage that he had converted into extra living space, and I had then had dedicated space for an operating position. This was in August of 1970. In 2020, I’ll have been continuously licensed for 50 years.
The following spring, I upgraded to Advanced, and during the summer mowed lawns and saved up for a Heathkit HW-101. Built it, and the quad on the tower, and 80 and 40 meter inverted vees on a 50 ft push up mast, and used all of it during my last couple of years of high school before going off to college to earn my EE degree.
So, you could say that my parents were involved, but not directly in my ham radio activities, but did allow me to ‘fall into’ ham radio, from all the various science pursuits during my younger years. I think they were glad that I found something that kept me home at night. They tolerated the antennas and tower with quad, which was really a big deal now that I look back on that.
But I also credit our electric shop teacher for being an Elmer and helping us see our way to doing something useful in shop, besides shocking frogs in garbage cans (we had high-volt bench supplies for tube projects), handing kids heavy transformers in lunch sacks, or charged high-voltage caps.