These Think Tank discussions have been wonderful.

From the first few classes I thought about brakes being the beginning.  All of the volunteers with this beginning class were adults.  While instructing them on derailleurs, one of them exclaimed, "So that's how that works."  These are people that are professionals and rode bikes but probably never looked at any of the mechanisms of this wondrous machine.

It is my hope that they and some of the actual students that are young people come back to help or take the class again.  I hope that we can entice them back with accessories for their bikes, trade in their bikes for better choices or just for further learning. 

Next week we have a group of women that are from a women's shelter.  This will probably only be a one evening event.  We are hoping that the youth bike program kids come back to assist.  Also, we hope that the women will tell a little about their personal stories.  This would provide a greater lesson beyond bikes to the younger folks. 

I am considering having their bikes pretty much ready to ride and then focus on a shop bike for a few basics.  The basics would be tire repair, safety inspection, brakes, etc.

For me, this whole bike thing is about freedom.  Learning how to repair them is furthering the whole freedom idea.  This is also about helping kids to learn how to use their hands.  Bicycles are as we all know pretty simple machines that there is little hidden from view.  But there are many mechanical principles that people can see and learn about.

Sorry for getting long winded but there is so much here that you all realize,
Eric

On 8/21/14 12:15 AM, christopher@holisticcycles.com wrote:
Have kids teach their specialty and rotate...
Brilliant in so many ways, Youth learning new skills with their hands, then learning the communication skills to teach and present to a group. It takes great teacher skills to lift up youth to be great mentors. 


Christopher Wallace
Holistic Cycles
140 Harrison St
Oak Park, IL. 60304

Have kids teach their specialty and rotate...
~~~~~~~~~~~
typing impaired by device, so phlat.
NB: BigBro monitors all, dude[tte]....
BackusNaurForm forgotten. 
Lied to re: Del msgs.  MailHoardersAnon*
On Aug 17, 2014 12:51 PM, "Eric Brozell" <brozells@verizon.net> wrote:
Hello,

We are right in the middle of starting up a youth workshop for ages 12-16 in Erie, Pa.  We just ran our first 1 1/2 hour a week program for 5 weeks.  There were 8 students and about 6 instructors that most of them had little bike repair experience.  We of course learned much from this first offering.  We had gone over the bikes some before we started and took care of the difficult problems.  This still was not sufficient time.  This was just a race to get everything done in our time frame.  We are planning on cutting back to 4 weeks but more time per class starting in September.  The Bikes Not Bombs video by Girls in Action was shown at the beginning and it was quite a hit.  We presently have limited resources (tools).  We have about 1 1/2 sets of tools.

In light of that we are going to try to have the volunteers specialize in their training.  What does everybody think about having one brake person, a bottom bracket, a shifter/derailer, wheel and headset specialist.  That way each person will have a handful of the proper tools to take care of each issue.  I believe we will have less tool searching time, parts searching, more efficient repairs and better instruction.

I have been mostly lurking the collective but everyone here helped me to consider launching this effort,
Eric


On 8/15/14 10:16 AM, veganboyjosh@gmail.com wrote:
There are some good resources on the wiki, here:

And here:

Full disclosure: i helped draft/teach the curriculum in the second link. It's also from 2008, so could probably use some updating. I found the workflow and tempo to work pretty well for even one teacher with 10-15 year old students, so long as the class size was no greater than 6. 




On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Dominik Zylka <domzylka@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello People,

Our developing high school bike program in Melbourne is in need of a fantastic workbook for our students to utilise. Our resources are completely outdated and participant numbers are increasing so we need a resource that will keep our students developing and learning. 

Contents we'd love:
- Workshop rules and procedures
- Worksheets on all the specific processes and anatomy's
- Activities
- Diagrams and explanations 
- you get the idea.

We understand that these resources take a heap of time and effort to compile and we'd be so very grateful if someone was willing to help out by sharing theirs. 

Best Regards

Dominik

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