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THIS IS SOME of the equipment used by Tongue Point Job Corps
trainees in the appliances workshop. Instructors at Tongue Point
sa> there's plenty of equipment available. Philco Corporation pro
titles the equipment and Insltuctors for the voeational education
program on a sub-contract from the University.
AN INSTRUCTOR (white coat) watches as a Job Corpsman w'orks
on an outboard motor in Tongue Point’s boat repair division. In
structors attempt to give trainers as much individual attention as
possible. The boat motors are used over and over by trainees.
Corps Trainees
Don't Like
Classrooms
(Editor’s Note: Job Corps trainees are almost all high school
dropouts. Most of them dropped out of school because they
didn’t like the regimented classrooms and book-learning of
fered in high school. They wanted to work. But they found
they didn’t have the skills they needed to get good jobs, so
they joined the Job Corps. But most of them aren’t used to
learning and don’t want “that bookwork stuff.” How do you
teach them what they need to know? This second of four
articles on the University operated urban Job Corps center
discusses Tongue Point’s answer to that question.)
By PHIL SEMAS
Associate Editor
TONGUE POINT (Special)—Job Corpsman Miguel Miranda has
spent 739 hours in classrooms and shops studying auto mechanics,
200 hours more working in local auto shops Last month he came
n hoc iimiii vd' auuii dim was
offered a job by an Oregon com
pany. >
Corpsman Alfred Harsha tried
several vocations, was above aver
age at everything he tried, but
didn’t get very far in any of them.
For the first time in his life he
found he was learning something,
but he couldn't settle on one field.
So he quit the Job Corps before
he could learn enough about any
one skill to assure himself a job
for very long.
Neither of these boys is typical
of trainees at Tongue Point. The
general rule, says Vocational
Training Director Ernie Lareau,
is '‘somewhere in between."
But almost all tne trainees
create problems of one kind or
another for Lareau, a big, good
natured, hearty man with a long
background in vocational educa
tion.
Most trainees come to Tongue
Point with no desire for class
ERNIE LAREAU
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So Lareau and his vocational education staff—all men who’ve
been top mechanics in industry—don’t give them any.
At most vocational schools the emphasis is on classroom work
from the beginning. At Tongue Point it’s just the reverse. Unless
they ask for classroom work, trainees start out with all work in the
shops.
"After they’ve worked around the shop for awhile, then they
realize they need the classroom work and they start asking for it,”
says Lareau. "When they do, we give it to them.”
But he emphasizes: "We don't put them in the classroom until
they want to. Not when we think they're ready, but when they
want to.”
For some it takes six or seven months to get them into the class
room. Some, of course, drop out without ever getting that far.
That's one of the major features of the training program at
Tongue Point: trainees proceed at their own rate.
When they first come to Tongue Point trainees look around the
center at the various programs. The trainee picks his own program
and he decides it all the way along—with advice from a staff
member
“Everything is elective because if the boy has a hand in bis own
program it works better,” says Lareau. "That’s why he dropped
out of school: because they were telling him what to take.”
Most of them start in a class of about 10. But they work at their
own rate of speed. "It’s possible to have boys in the same group at
10 different levels,” according to Program Analyst Ira Heard, whose
job it is to check on instructor’s efforts.
But when a trainee drops far behind the others in his group, he
(Continued on page ~)
A GROUP OF JOB COUPS trainees work at a table in the Tongue Point center’s small appliance di
vision. The man fourth from the left is the instructor. The center also offers a program in automo
bile repair.