UC Schools

Our maker club had twelve members and no budget. I was not elected to lead it. I simply had the key to the physics room, which in practice is the same thing.

For the first two months I ran it badly. I chose the projects, I fixed the mistakes, and I stayed late redoing other people's work so the results would be good. The projects were good. Attendance halved.

The correction came from a member called Ines, who told me — kindly, in the corridor — that there was no reason to come to a club where the interesting decisions had already been made. So I changed how it worked. Every project got an owner who was not me. I was allowed to ask questions and not to touch the tools. When the 3D printer's first extruder jammed, I did not fix it. I sat with the two students who had built it while they diagnosed it themselves, which took ninety minutes instead of my ten.

Attendance recovered, then doubled. By the end of the year we had a working printer, a rooftop weather station, and a wooden calculator built by two students who had joined saying they were "not technical".

What I actually learned is narrower than the word leadership suggests. Doing the work yourself is not generosity; it is a way of keeping the interesting parts. The harder skill was sitting on my hands for ninety minutes.

I still find it uncomfortable. I have simply learned that discomfort is usually the sign that somebody else is learning something.