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PITTSBURG —
Nothing builds confidence like success. Nothing creates success like persistence.
But even persistence requires guidance or it will fail.
At least that’s my way of thinking.
I am a math teacher and I think that math is interesting in its own right, but mathematicians, physicists, and engineers are all of a kind.
They will hang us all on the same tree when the time comes.
We are all rather persistent cusses and we all try to order a disordered world.
Mathematicians do it in their heads.
Our work all goes on between our ears and pours out onto a yellow pad.
Physicists have to venture out into the world in order to measure it in various ways.
They set up experiments. They take data.
But engineers are builders.
They make things.
Jesus told Nicodemus that that no man could be saved unless he was born again and became as a little child.
Recently, I’ve become more like a little child and I’ve started doing--along with my 13-year-old daughter--some of those things physicists and engineers do when they are children.
She and I made a crystal radio using an old chili powder bottle, copper wire, a piezo-electric earpiece, and a germanium diode.
We put it all together, grounded it on our chain link fence, and listened.
It’s amazing because it doesn’t require a battery; it runs on the energy from the radio waives themselves.
My 13-year-old was hooked, and so was I.
Building this sort of stuff has become an obsession. I was talking about it the other day with a fellow I will called Randy the Engineer.
(Note that I didn’t say the randy engineer; that would be something different. Word order is important.)
He told me how to make an electric motor from a Styrofoam cup.
Seriously.
You use a Styrofoam cup, two paper clips, a battery, some copper wire, and a neodymium [pronounced NEE-O-DIM-EE-UM] magnet. It takes 10 minutes and you have a little electric motor.
The one downside to this is that I’ve become addicted to neodymium magnets.
They are scary powerful and fun to play with.
I’ve scoured the Internet looking for ways for me to play with more of them.
These engineers are like drug pushers.
They get you hooked, and then you are done for.
Thirty years ago, when I was going through college, I took physics and I had some good teachers (Hi Dr Weems and Dr. Rutledge!), but I came into class unprepared to get the full good out of it.
Nothing builds confidence like success. Nothing creates success like persistence.
But even persistence requires guidance or it will fail.
At least that’s my way of thinking.
I am a math teacher and I think that math is interesting in its own right, but mathematicians, physicists, and engineers are all of a kind.
They will hang us all on the same tree when the time comes.
We are all rather persistent cusses and we all try to order a disordered world.
Mathematicians do it in their heads.
Our work all goes on between our ears and pours out onto a yellow pad.
Physicists have to venture out into the world in order to measure it in various ways.
They set up experiments. They take data.
But engineers are builders.
They make things.
Jesus told Nicodemus that that no man could be saved unless he was born again and became as a little child.
Recently, I’ve become more like a little child and I’ve started doing--along with my 13-year-old daughter--some of those things physicists and engineers do when they are children.
She and I made a crystal radio using an old chili powder bottle, copper wire, a piezo-electric earpiece, and a germanium diode.
We put it all together, grounded it on our chain link fence, and listened.
It’s amazing because it doesn’t require a battery; it runs on the energy from the radio waives themselves.
My 13-year-old was hooked, and so was I.
Building this sort of stuff has become an obsession. I was talking about it the other day with a fellow I will called Randy the Engineer.
(Note that I didn’t say the randy engineer; that would be something different. Word order is important.)
He told me how to make an electric motor from a Styrofoam cup.
Seriously.
You use a Styrofoam cup, two paper clips, a battery, some copper wire, and a neodymium [pronounced NEE-O-DIM-EE-UM] magnet. It takes 10 minutes and you have a little electric motor.
The one downside to this is that I’ve become addicted to neodymium magnets.
They are scary powerful and fun to play with.
I’ve scoured the Internet looking for ways for me to play with more of them.
These engineers are like drug pushers.
They get you hooked, and then you are done for.
Thirty years ago, when I was going through college, I took physics and I had some good teachers (Hi Dr Weems and Dr. Rutledge!), but I came into class unprepared to get the full good out of it.
I could do the calculations for the electrical circuits flawlessly, but it had no meaning for me.
The result was a number without a concrete association.
It was only marks on paper.
Having spent time wrapping magnet wire around a chili powder bottle with my own hand so that I can use it in my crystal radio, I am now curious as to how it fits into the big scheme. I would like to go back to being a 17-year-old in my College Physics class and do it all over again.
Not that I would give up math.
Like a mathematical Chico Escuela (Garret Morris’s character on the old Saturday Night Live) “Mathematics been very, very good to me.”
But I’ve always wanted to understand things, and that was an area where I could come up the numbers but didn’t understand.
Life is not lived that way though.
We’ve got one direction: straight ahead. I can’t live my life again, but I can take a little time to prepare my daughter’s mind to be ready for physics in a way that mine wasn’t.
And, since I do make my living as a teacher, I can use this to gain a better understanding of where those physics and engineering students in my classes are coming from.
A teacher has one life but can touch thousands.
Excuse me now, I have to go play with my copper wire and neodymium magnets.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University. He blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com.
