A huge portion of our membership consists of students and the teachers who refer those students to SMNetwork. Between them, the link from wikipedia's entry on Rehearsal Reports, and our mentions in stage management textbooks like Stern and Kelly, the word on the street is that we accept students. Pair that with the closed nature of both the SMA forums and Control Booth, we must acknowledge that we are one of the few online venues where young SM's have even a shot at finding guidance. I was just barely past the intern phase of my SM career myself when I started this site. It has always had a large educational portion. We cannot ignore our student members.
Now, this doesn't mean that we should mollycoddle them either. In an ideal world, students would plan ahead for their projects, visit us early in the semester, read the rules and spend several months establishing their "street cred" in our little community before they ask for help. I do not doubt that we have several members who have done exactly that, and have obtained their answers slowly over the course of regular conversation through the year without us even detecting that they were using us for school help. I'm also sure (based on the site stats) that many students find the answers they need without needing to register or comment.
These types of issues tend to crop up towards the end of each semester when last minute folk hit the boards looking to have us save the day. We have tried through our student policies to make it difficult for these unprepared folk to have an easy ride - the barriers for entry are high and our moderators are trained to go to every possible length to prevent hit and run posts. After all, students who wait to the last minute are not going to make good stage managers. Even so, we must realize that for every successful stage manager there will be many, many bad ones out there who don't read the rules, cannot follow directions, do not plan ahead, and generally do not know how to behave in a professional forum. We don't want to let these bad apples spoil it for the good guys with potential.
My personal view is that we should first try to a) rehabilitate them through strict enforcement of the existing rules and b) ignore them if they don't come up to the high road with us. That being said, this is your community - I just run the servers.
There is something to be said for forcing stage management students to communicate with us on our terms. Their success will depend heavily on their ability to reach out in person, rather than hiding behind mass emails and digital methods of communication, especially when they get to dealing with fussy designers and actors who are not always the most tech savvy.
From a technical perspective, the quick fix is to disable replies for Homework Help. Students with at least 5 public posts would still be able to add their projects, but follow up would have to occur in private. However, this would prevent written contributions that do emerge from these projects from being used by future readers who find the answers via search. Some good content has come out of Homework Help discussions and I do worry that taking them private will harm the community warehousing of our collective knowledge. It may also result in a lot of redundancy.
The other route we could take would be to switch to a more formal mentorship program. This is just an off the cuff rough, but in theory:
- SMs can opt in to be mentors. This would require that they provide us with contact info (phone and email), experience level, and sign in at least once every 60 days.
- Twice a year (September and January), if we have unpaired mentors, we can open the field for 3 month long pairings.
- Students would be paired at random with a mentor at a higher career level in the same country. No further screening would occur.
- If we have no mentors, no pairings will be allowed for that term.
- Students must be willing to commit to the full 3 month mentorship agreement.
- These would be volunteer pairings. No guarantee will be made that the pairing would be good or beneficial to either party. No restrictions would be made on how the mentorship would proceed, although certainly regular conversation would be a plus.
- Posts on the current Homework Help board would be distributed to their pertinent boards, and the board would be deleted.
- All requests for homework help outside of mentorships would be banned. Open calls for mentorship pairings would become the only opportunity for students to get some form of "Homework Help." If they miss the open call or no open call occurs due to lack of mentor interest, too bad.
This would encourage the good, well-prepared stage managers while blocking the slackers completely. However, I would need someone to run the thing, because I'm certainly way too busy to handle something like this. I could theoretically hash out the code for tracking if mentors have logged in recently, but I've been working 12-14 hour days since January with only 2 days off, and no sign of a break until October. Also, this still does nothing to help build our knowledge base here on the site, which must be my first concern.
Further thoughts and refinement are appreciated, but let's not point fingers at any particular members. There's currently no crying in stage management, but I don't want this thread to alter that for any of our members, young or old.
