The second aspect of the time problem was only having students for one quarter. The different technical areas had varied degrees of success in being able to get enterprises up and running each quarter. For some, it just was not feasible. The technical areas that actually ran enterprises generated the most student interest for the fourth-quarter selections. Desktop publishing lent itself well to microenterprise development. Students established a greeting card publishing company, called All Seasons, which designed and produced cards in different languages for various ethnic holidays. (With Cambridge's large immigrant population and with 46 languages spoken in the high school, All Seasons met a large need.)
When using a school-based enterprise as a learning experience, the depth of learning relates to the volume of business. The more business, the greater the variety of situations the students have to face and problems they have to solve. There are a certain number of curve balls that the teacher can throw into the program to raise practical problems and issues, but students realize the artificiality. We concluded that enterprises are better as semester, full-year, or even multiyear experiences, so students can both plan and problem solve once the enterprise is in action.
In addition to time problems, coordination between Industries and Humanities was extremely difficult, since the Humanities teacher taught during Industries staff meetings. Faced with the choice between having both Industries and Humanities teachers meet together each day or having the Industries and Humanities classes scheduled back-to-back, we had chosen the latter. We believed that we would need the back-to-back classes in order to take students out of the building for industry visits, obtaining supplies, and so on. In retrospect, we would choose the joint planning time. (Obviously, a schedule that allowed for both would be ideal.) With curriculum for both classes being developed as the year progressed, we missed opportunities to reinforce each other.
We also struggled with the issue of student choice versus teacher preparation. At any given moment, in a single Humanities class, students were studying four or five different industries. If each student got to do something regarding that industry, the Humanities teachers would have had to be prepared to coach work in, say, carpentry, culinary, drafting, electronics, and electrical. This posed a problem as we considered research projects and oral histories. Students would need coaching and help in identifying information sources. The amount of teacher preparation demanded was unrealistic, especially for first-year teachers. The lack of common planning time with the Industries teachers augmented the problem. Some of the ideas would have been more feasible if the Industries and Humanities teachers had more planning time together, or even better, were team teaching the class.
Finally, Industries continued to suffer from one of the same ailments that had afflicted the Electric Vehicle Project: rotation syndrome. Students did not want to rotate out of technical areas where they felt comfortable. If we let them stay, they would lose out on learning about other areas and practicing transferring skills. If we forced them to rotate, the program would begin to feel like the old exploratory program.
By the end of the school year, the Rindge staff decided that, although it was a big improvement over the Electric Vehicle Project for tenth graders, Industries would have to be restructured. The core idea--of students developing and operating microenterprises--was adapted for an entrepreneurship class and for upper-grade enterprises in the four career paths--both of which are discussed later in this chapter.