I’ve been a member for a number of years now and I used to teach classes, but I haven’t for some time so I wanted to familiarize myself with the current rules.
I’m considering teaching in the blacksmithing area and before I do I want to get some things defined…
In the Honarium rules section of our rules Rules and Policies - Dallas Makerspace it says the honarium is $50. Elsewhere I’ve found that it has been reduced to $25. Which is true?
If I charge for the class on the event calendar does the money go to the committee or into the general DMS fund? Can the committee expect to see any of it or does the committee need to get money from the BOD?
If I wanted to teach a class and charge more than a nominal fee such as $200 for teaching a Damascus steel class, which would take multiple days to teach, can the teacher just get paid directly by the students? (I have a person in mind who is an expert in teaching this and he isn’t going to do it for an honorarium.)
If I wanted to put up a recurring class such as training on the blacksmithing equipment would this require me to get approval before each class? For instance if I wanted to teach the class every Tuesday from 7:30-10:00PM?
I assume we need to take roll call at the class, but where do I report this information? Previously, it was on a piece of paper.
I assume I can just teach a class, take money at the time of the class, forgo the honorarium and do whatever I want to do with the money such as use it to buy tools for blacksmihing etc.
I apologize if this information should be obvious to me but I since I haven’t taught a class in quite a while I wanted to confirm how everything works before teaching again.
My son Nicolas (20) has been wanting to learn some blacksmithing, and I hope you do start teaching because you are awesome! So you have at least “2” folks, me and him, ready to learn!
@Bizwacky says that we’re going to get the bookkeeping fixed Any Day Now so that the committee gets their $50.
Yes. The teacher can be paid directly by the students. There’s also an option where DMS can pay for a specialist teacher. You’d have to discuss that with the Board for limitations, but it is an option. We brought in a professional welder to teach Train the Trainers, and he wasn’t cheap.
Each class has to go on the Calendar with a 6.5 day lead, and a 48 hour wait for non-honorarium or a 72 hr wait for honorarium. Current max is 6 honorariums per month.
Attendance is now reported on the Calendar. I log in, go to the My Account tab (same spot as the log-in), click the class I’m reporting info for, and check off the attendance. If it’s a class I’ve had trouble getting the 3 students to show up for, I go for the “30 minute extended registration option” when setting up the class. That lets me register folks who didn’t sign up so that I can count them.
The Honorarium was dropped to $25 for a while, but eventually it was raised back to $50. If you could point us towards where you saw the $25 figure (such as if it was in the wiki or official DMS rules or something), it’d be good to get that updated.
The most important thing is that you need to pick one or other re: charging the students or the space, but never both. If the students pay you directly, you cannot request honorarium or that DMS provides/refunds material. If you take honorarium, any money the students pay for the class has to go to DMS, not yourself. As long as you keep the two separate though, I don’t believe there’s any problem.
This used the way it was when I was teaching. But walk-ins, substitutes, late arrivals were always a problem. Does the current calendar allow the instructor to add at the time of the class so they are added in with others to AD? I hope so, it was a real pain and problem, becuase if submitted then the person didn’t have access until someone manually enter it. Granted this usually happened fairly fast, 3< three days
There’s an option when you make the class that you can allow people to sign up up to 30 minutes after the class starts. The trick is that you can’t adjust the cap after you set the class, if you set it for 5 and have 2 sign up with 3 walk-ons, it’s fine, but if you already have 5 signed up and there’s a walkon that you’re like “yeah, no, I can do 6 it’s fine, come on in” it gets a lot harder.
While I never ask for honorarium and pocket money for my time, I do ask students to buy materials from me. Given the current way that Glassworks is handling material, I decided that I’d just buy the glass I needed/wanted and sell it to the students.
Well, from an honorarium standpoint, if I’ve got 5 folks signed up, I’m gold. If it’s a class that fulfills a requirement, then I’ve got to put the AD permission into the AD group manually. One weirdness is that anybody can teach a class, but you have to have been put into the AD teachers group by the committee chair. I discovered that when I tried to add some sewing permissions, and found that there was no teachers AD group for any of Creative Arts…
Can you provide links/other directions to any of these? If they’re correctable, we’d love to correct them. Examples: if the wiki says $25.00 somewhere, we can correct. If this is in an old post on Talk, less likely we can (or will) edit to change.
It’s pedantic, but bears noting: this is not an “approval” process. The 48-72 hours in limbo after submission before posting to the calendar is a review time during which the event/class might be rejected. Getting posted to the calendar is not “approval”, but lack of having been rejected.
But yes, each event/class requires submission and then the review time, even those that meet regularly. We’ve talked about “fast tracking”, but so far nothing actionable has come of those ideas.
Beth’s done a great job responding to each point, I’m not finding the backing “rule” for this one:
As far as I know, just the (up to) 72 hour review period must be met for classes. Am I just overlooking the 6.5 days?
Yes, indeed. It is a bit of a slog, but if you’re intending to teach classes regularly that need an AD group linked, we can, at the chair’s request, set up permissions for the instructor to manage the AD group in question, making walk-ons, etc. easier for the instructor.
Forgot to say @coloneldan I am excited to see you’re wanting to get into teaching again. Those classes I took with you were some of my favorite!
Thank you!
The 6 day thing is there, too… But I don’t find it in Rules… @Bizwacky I believe is the arbiter of all Honorarium disputes…is the “6-day” thing still a thing? (was it ever?)
It may just be in the Calendar. It used to be 10 days out (3 days for approval/non-rejection and 7 days for folks to see it and sign up). Then it was just 7 days for a bit. Now it’s 6 days or slightly more – for those of us who tend to log classes late in the day, but need to make the class itself at a reasonable hour for more-normal humans.
The Calendar itself used to reject classes that didn’t allow enough time on the Calendar. I haven’t hit that recently, but then I don’t try to log classes that aren’t at least 7 “days” later than when I’m posting.
I think it used to be in the rules but we got rid of it when we cleaned them up. No minimum time requirement, you just need 3 attendees and enough time for the class to post to the calendar.
If you charge on the calendar, the money is supposed to go to the committee but it currently goes to general fund. To fix that I either need a volunteer to trash this garbage braintree integration update the calendar, or to go back through the transaction log and manually class everything.
If you choose to donate your honorarium rather than take it, that $50 does go to the committee and the bookkeeping should be fixed any day now.
You’re totally welcome to do this. You could also donate the honorarium to the committee, if the class would otherwise be honorarium eligible.
Generally the intent is for class fees and donated honorariums to function just like any other donation to the committee, earmarked money for them on top of their budget. Unfortunately I’m fighting some system limitations so it’s not quite as seamless as I’d like.
Note that if you take honorarium or request direct payment, it is considered taxable income. To receive honorarium, you have to fill out some tax forms, provide your SSN to DMS, and the income will be reported at year’s end.
If you choose to buy tooling with your honorarium/direct payment, you’ll still likely have to pay taxes on the income. The tooling likely could be considered a tax deductible donation (assuming you get acceptance of the items by the Chair and receive a receipt) but that might not make you “whole.”
To be honest I’m not too worried about the taxes, but I appreciate the information. I’m happy to provide whatever information is necessary for the tax man. I’m just interested in getting more blacksmithing classes going.
Right now we only teach one class a month. I’m recommending some changes to what we do there, too. It is still being discussed in the committee. Part of the reservation is the heat outside this time of year.
Ideally, we can resume teaching one class a week on the KMG, Induction forge, Cutoff saw, and Hydrolic press. I plan to make a rudimentary hot cut chisel in the process of teaching this class.
This is also still in the works. @Gearstorian is now the blacksmithing committees education training/lead instructor chair. I’m working with him and @jbrown885, the committee chair, on the details.
Would love to have you in the class. In fact a thought occured to me. We could teach a knife making class and then a complimentary sheath making class. You could probably help teaching the leather class. In fact we could teach how to make wood/resin handles as part of the knifemaking effort, too.
I’ll put some thought into how we could do this. The next class in June is making some nails as a blacksmithing warm up. Every blacksmith should be able to do this. Then making a railroad spike knife in the remainder of the class. Railroad spike knives aren’t really very good knives because the material is low carbon but they are very popular.
