by Alan R. Sandler

One of the more gratifying programs the Architectural Foundation of San Francisco sponsors is teaching high-school students about the design and construction process. It is gratifying because you see these students developing a real understanding and appreciation of how professionals work.

For a lot of high-school-age kids, work means taking orders at McDonald’s or stacking light bulbs at WalMart. To them, the world of professionals is very obtuse. To get around that disconnect and maximize the benefit of the mentorship experience, we focus first on connecting students to a project under design and construction. At first, the students with whom we work have a misconception about how the physical environment is created. They think architects build buildings, contractors drive nails, and engineers do something exotic, but they’re not really sure what. They have no idea why or what lawyers, accountants, developers, or any of the other players of the design and construction team do and how it all fits together. That is why, in the mentorship program we have developed, we see to it that a group of students follows one project under development for the semester. It is much more effective than the more typical mentorship where the students go into an architect’s office and end up being relegated to watching, filing, and sharpening pencils because they see things happening in real time.

I explain this to architect mentors with a story of one young man who had spent a week watching an architect work. At the end of five days, the student said, “You know, I’ve been here for a week, and you are incredibly busy, but you don’t get anything accomplished. The first thing you do is come to your desk, turn your computer on, and pick up your voice mail from your phone while you’re looking at your e-mails. Your voice mails aren’t linked together and don’t have a lot to do with your e-mails. And then you grab a bunch of papers and go off to a meeting, which has nothing to do with either the voice mail or your e-mail. And then you go off to another meeting that maybe has nothing to do with the first meeting. Your day unfolds with one meeting after another with different people and groups of people; some discussions in your office, a lot of them out of your office; you’re on the phone and e-mail for awhile. But at the end of the day, nothing happened. In school, we’ll get an assignment, such as write a 300-word essay that’s due on Friday. I write it, turn it in, I’m done, and I move on. You come to Friday and you’re still doing some of the stuff you started on Monday.”

In the office environment, I’ve learned, architects normally don’t know how to keep the kids busy doing something that has real meaning. So the challenge is to get the students to see progress in a complex process that may stretch over many years. It’s not the structured life most of these kids are used to. And it’s not just that way for architects; this is a challenge for teaching high-school students what anyone does who is involved in the creation of the physical environment.

The project-centric model
We connect students to a project that will capture their attention first and then to one of the players involved in that project—be it the architect, engineer, builder, or lawyer—who will be their mentor through the filter of that project. Having an actual project to talk about also makes it easier for the designers and other people in the office to relate what they do. And the project filter helps the students understand better that a building runs on an extended time continuum. They see that the project started well before they walked into it and, in all likelihood, will continue well after they leave.

The program involves at least three hours a week. Currently, we have students with their mentors six hours a week during the academic year. During the summer, it’s about 20 hours a week.

For one major historic restoration, we had different groups of students involved over three years in every phase of that project from beginning to end. Interestingly, the part that seemed to get the students’ attention the most was when the building was being taken apart and people were still discovering what they needed to know. The students enjoyed watching, for example, the relaying of mosaics, one little piece at a time, to match the original that had been covered over for 80 years.

We also have students studying a couple of new projects. One has been on the boards for four years in design and permit approval, and now they’re just starting to drive piles. The students find it hard to understand that this is the fifth year of this project, but people have been working on the site now for only three months. That’s a long time for anybody. For the students, though, the project has been under way for nearly a third of their lives, but nothing appears to have happened.

Real world application links classroom lessons
By seeing designers, builders, and accountants applying math and social studies in the real work world, students gain a better understanding of why they are studying the abstract academic subjects that they do. As an example, we have a group who just started the program this semester, and in one of the first sessions we were dealing with 90-degree angles. One student said, “I know what that term is. I remember it. I had that on a test. But what does it mean?” When taught in the abstract, it’s one thing; when you’re standing on a site and you can see that 90-degree angle, it’s another. In the classroom, it is painfully common that the only relevance they see to what they are learning is that they have to pass the standards tests. It’s taught and quizzed but not brought to life.

Aside from the academics, the real-world setting allows the students to see how people behave as professionals. You have issues that come up on a construction site constantly. Something isn’t right, it’s too short, or it isn’t where it should be; particularly in renovations. What the students discover and talk about a lot is that when something is incorrect, instead of spending a lot of time finding someone to blame, there is a real attempt by everyone involved to move ahead and solve it by considering all of the different factors that are involved in terms of time, effort, materials, and money. Team members discuss how to resolve the individual situations to keep the overall project moving and stay on a larger schedule and deal with larger issues.

In one project, a service elevator required cutting through the floors of an existing structure, starting at the top and working down. When they opened up the ground floor, the project team found power cables running under the building that weren’t supposed to be there. It turned out to be the main power supply for the Bay Area Rapid Transit. They weren’t on any of the as-built drawings, nor on any BART drawings, but there they were, and they weren’t going to move. The students saw how everyone came together—BART’s electricians and engineers, the owner’s engineers, the architect and their consultants, and the developer—for two days redesigning around this unforeseen obstacle. For the students it was fascinating to watch all of these different players, including attorneys and people working the budget, all making tradeoffs among themselves about how they would do it and what can be done given the circumstances. It was one of those wonderful moments when everybody is involved. It’s fascinating because it’s real.

Another side of the experience is getting rid of some misconceptions of who does what. For instance, they see contractors drawing and sketching as a form of communication, the same as the engineers and architects. To solve a problem in the field, somebody picks up a pencil and starts drawing on the fiberboard so everybody can understand what’s happening. That’s new for the students, too, because they typically learn to appreciate drawing only in terms of the finished work, not as a form of communication.

These programs involve a concerted effort
Running a program like this starts with the organization of resources. We get support from almost all the building professions and trades. And we spend a lot of time at conferences and in the schools talking with the principals, vice principals, guidance counselors, and teachers to generate interest in incorporating the program into their curriculum and presenting it to students whom they think would benefit.

We have students from every socio-economic and demographic group. And what they learn extends beyond how the physical environment is created. A lot of it is an introduction to what work really looks like and what behaviors need to be manifested in terms of being on time and on budget. For a lot of kids, it brings out their own ability to take control of their own lives and be part of something rather than just be victimized. They see people making a difference in a whole variety of ways. And they learn that contractors and construction-equipment operators are really smart people, too, many with advanced degrees, who like to work with their hands and get to apply all of the skills they learned in graduate programs in the real world in real time.

So we communicate that to guidance counselors, faculty, and administrators and enlist their help in motivating those students to apply for this program who are ready for this kind of opportunity and for whom the program will make a difference in their lives.

As in our other AFSF programs, this mentoring program involves a long, serious partnership with a variety of players—from the school system that provides the students to the students themselves and the design and construction mentors. It’s a real serious commitment to interdisciplinary cooperation, which means reaching out, being receptive to the other people’s ideas, and working multilaterally. That, for some folks, is a hard lesson. But it’s worth it.

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