The BISHOPS MILLS
NATURAL HISTORY CENTRE

READING FELLOWS

...An apprenticeship is more like employment than conventional schooling is, as neither the state nor parents are paying the mentor to instruct the apprentice. An apprentice pays the mentor by helping with tasks that are educational for him, but tedious for the mentor. If the apprentice is living in the mentor's household, he must also make an adult contribution to the working of the household. This evidently is often difficult, and requires careful screening of potential apprentices. Teaching and learning between individuals is such a fundamental human instinct that there is little to describe about it, but it may be hard to arrange in a society in which 'learning' and 'living' are often treated as different activities.

We naively replied to our first potential apprentice with: "We are committed to apprenticeship as the only effective method of education, and for my part, would be very glad to have you come to stay with us for as long as you feel that this is worthwhile for you... I hope this does not sound too forward, but beyond your letter the recommendations of John Holt and capriculture suffice for us," but we have found that much more than that is required to ensure a successful apprenticeship.

Our Recognized Responsibilities as Mentors:

1) We try to have plenty of work for an apprentice that will be both useful to us and instructive to the apprentice, and to see that the apprentice has free access to the literature of their subject, and to other workers in the field.

2) We try to provide the apprentice with satisfactory privacy, food, and other personal requirements - though we're wary of proceeding with an apprenticeship in which these requirements are too different from our own - an indication of incompatibility.

3) We try to calmly delegate authority, and to be prepared to tolerate mistakes, errors, and setbacks, while not assigning an excess of house-keeping tasks, or becoming sullen when weeks of rain keep us cooped up in a small tent.

3) We try to be sensitive to signs of concealed misunderstanding, or defensiveness due to intimidation. A mentor may be tall and bearded, talk in an off-hand polysyllabic jargon, and carry a 2 m dipnet and a goatskin bag for reasons entirely unrelated to intimidation - but still terrify a potential apprentice into silence.

SUGGESTIONS for the POTENTIAL APPRENTICE:

2) Be sure that your knowledge of a field is at an appropriate level; that you have learned all you can on your own. If you are leaving home solely to live and work with someone, it would seem appropriate that you have the level of knowledge of the field imparted by a senior high school or introductory university course in the subject. Have examples of your work for the mentor to evaluate.

3) Be sure that you are skilled in listening to other people talk to each other, and that you participate in decision-making in your family. If your parents decide what to do in your presence and then must explain it to you, then you are not ready for apprenticeship - your mentor may explain something to his spouse in great detail so that you can have the opportunity to learn it without direct instruction, and after that special effort, they will be irked if you haven't listened because he wasn't talking directly to you.

4) Be sure that you can understand and accept praise and critisicm from someone who is much better at what you are doing than you are, and who is focused on doing the work, rather than on what you've done: "OK," or "smooth it down a bit over there," or "Have you checked Wildlife Abstracts?" may be the response for work that would be showered with praise or A's at home or school. The highest praise available will often be "That's done about as well as I could have done it," and assessments will be understated and intermittent.

5) Be sure that you are prepared for the drudgery of your field, and are not just caught up in the romance of its products. Fishing may be all bright air, and flashing fins, and pan-fried fillets, but fisheries are grams of secondary benthic production per square metre, and ambiguous scale annuli, and half-digested stomach contents, and mathematical models of population structure. Original work in any field requires lots of tedious repetitive tasks that must be done exactly right.

SUGGESTIONS for getting the POTENTIAL APPRENTICE & MENTOR TOGETHER: