"Bill" wrote in message
. 97.142...
Joe Pfeiffer wrote in
:

snip
We don't get any money for having a class on the books. Only for
actually having the class take place, and we get money on the basis of
how many students actually take the class. But it takes money to put
on the class (money to pay for the instructor, money for lab
facilities...). According to some mystic formula that I'm not privy
to -- and near as I can tell, nobody else is, either -- it takes ten
students for an undergrad class to pay for itself. If there are less
than ten, you have to make a *really* good case in order for the class
to happen. It doesn't really matter whether the class had a cap of 15
students or it was scheduled for a lecture hall that would fit 200 --
10 is the magic number.
snip

You're right, I received a message from admissions office and they told
me that the class had to be completely filled, 10 students, before it
would be allowed to take place. They also told me that it had taken
place last winter but she couldn't remember when it had been held before
that.

One last bit, and maybe it's just me be sexist but, it was implied that
the teacher is female. How many people have run into female machinists
in real life???(Real question!!) I had been hoping for someone with real
world experience in the field not someone who just learned it in school.
I'm going to have to find out more of her background before I decide to
sign up again. Yes this is profiling and if it was a man I wouldn't
worry as much but if I'd found out he was young and never was in the
trade I hesitate too. Again, I don't have any experience in the field or
been around anyone who might know but I'd suspect that female machinists
are rare.

Having visited hundreds of shops and plants over the course of a career, I
can confirm that they're pretty rare. Of course there are a lot of female
machine operators in production plants today, but very few machinists or
toolmakers. Interestingly, the few that I've run into tend to be very good.

If your instructor has no shop experience she may still be good at teaching
how things should be done. The textbooks aren't written by academics; or if
they do the actual writing, they're always reviewed and revised by real shop
people. But learning that way will never teach you the tricks and the
subtleties.

You may not want to learn the "tricks" of many machinists today, however. A
lot of them are a load of crap. Too many "machinists" are mostly self-taught
and never had the knowledge of materials or processes to make good judgments
about how to do things.

Still, given a choice, I'd rather be taught by a real shop person.

--
Ed Huntress