Synopsis of Auto Tech 1 This Year
My name is Alex Heiman, and I am a first-year student at Indian Valley Vocational Center (IVVC). I am currently taking Auto Tech 1. This has been a very interesting school year so far because of COVID-19. Due to COVID-19, Auto Tech had to change the curriculum for this year.
We started the year off with learning how to use the lifts properly. At the beginning I wasn't very comfortable with using lifts, but thankfully we have a very good instructor to show us how to use the lifts properly. After learning how to use the lifts for about a week or two, I was able to use the lifts comfortably.
Then we had to do safety training which was done online, but we were able to get certifications that we can use for the real world. This would have been the first thing we did at the beginning of the school year. However, our instructor decided to teach us lift safety first, and then get certified so that we could go into the shop and learn about hand tools and how to use them.
After all of that we went into the maintenance portion of the class and learned how to do oil changes - which I already knew how to do - but it is always good to learn different ways to do something. After that we went on to wheels and tires, learning how to take tires off the rim and how to patch a tire. This section was truthfully my favorite because it was relatively easy and I had a lot of fun doing this.
Wheels and tires were the last things we did in-person because of COVID-19. DeKalb County decided to shut down and that meant that IVVC had to go remote. So while being in the adaptive pause we are learning about the braking system, which is especially difficult while being remote. But our instructors are doing their best to teach us about the braking system even though we are learning remotely. Thankfully with what they have shown us so far, once we can go back to in-person instruction we should be able to do most of the things they have shown us.