Connecting Home and Shcool Experiences

I was missing one blog assignment, so here it is.

The fact that the technology and engineering discipline is so broad makes it easy for me to connect it to home experiences.  I attribute a lot of these experiences to my dad.  My dad isn't an engineer, so the areas that I connected with most were the traditional shop type areas.  I remember hearing things and seeing things on TV about repairmen and mechanics, but I thought that nobody actually took their car to a mechanic-at least not as often as people did on TV, kind of like the mailman doesn't really come walking down the sidewalk and put your mail in the mailbox (where I grew up we didn't have sidewalks and we had to go to the post office to get our mail).   If one of our cars was having problems or need an oil change my dad would fix it.  If the washer broke my dad would fix it.  If we needed a dog pen or a shed my dad would build it.  I thought that all dads knew how to fix stuff and make things.  I would often tag along with my dad and be the one who handed him things, he would also explain what he was doing, and as a result at a young age I knew the difference between a wrench, a pair of pliers, vise grips, and channel locks. 
When I was in cub scouts we had the greatly anticipated pinewood derby.  If you did the pinewood derby usually one of two things happened: 1)Dad would take the car to the shop and lock you out and design the sleekest, most aerodynamic, low-profile vehicle known to man. Then he would polish the axles, put the weight in the right places and add the top secret lubricant.  If you were lucky you got to sand it a little and carry it to the weighing table at the race.  Or the other scenario was 2) your car would sit in the box under a pile of dirty clothes in your room until the day before the race and you would frantically look for it and not find it, give up looking beg your mother to go pick up another one because it's the most important day of your life, and when she finally gets home with the new one you've already found the one that was lost and have pounded the wheels in with a rock and colored it with crayons-done.  Luckily I didn't fall into either of these categories.  My dad took this and turned it into a learning experience.  He asked what I wanted it to look like and helped me sketch it out on the block of wood, then he took me to his work and showed me how to use the band saw.  After showing me how to make a cut and giving me a safety tip (don't cut your finger off or your mom will kick my ass), he gave me a chair to stand on and turned little 8-year-old me loose.  After cutting it out he gave me a lesson on friction and taught me about getting the burrs off heads of the nails used for the axles and smoothing out the shafts and wheels.  After hours of sanding I learned about primer and paint.  Once that was complete and I thought my fingers were going to fall off from sanding so much, he told me that we wanted to be as close to the maximum weight as possible so then I got to use a drill to put holes in the bottom so we could glue pennies inside to make it heavier.  Then we were off to the post office with the car, wheels, axles and about $3.78 in pennies to weigh it on their scale.  Race day came and I got 2nd place- not too bad.  The next year I chose a more difficult design and ended up winning first place.  My third year my little brother was old enough to be is scouts so my dad took us to his work and told me to start working on my car while he helped my brother.  That year I pretty much did the whole thing myself and won first place again. 

My '83 Scamp GT still at my parents house waiting for me

 

When I was 17 I was sharing a car with my older sister that my parents bought for us.  It was a white 1980 Cadillac El Dorado with an Oldsmobile 350 engine that was about a mile and a half long.  My sister was going to go to college and my parents said that she would get the car, so if I wanted to drive I had to buy my own car. After searching the classifieds for months I saw something I could afford, the ad said: 1983 Plymouth truck $495. We went to look at it and it was perfect (not to mention sexy too.  It turns out that it was a 1983 Plymouth Scamp GT of which only 1380 were made ).  The next day at school I borrowed a friend's car and went to the bank during lunch, took $500 savings and picked it up that night.  Now, if you go out and buy a $500 car you can't slap a temporary registration on it and send a 17 year old off to drive all over the place the next day.  Now that I had my very own car that I had paid for I was really interested in helping out my dad work on it and not just being the tool holder.  I was thinking one day about how the transmission worked, particularly how the gears would mesh when shifting (it was a stick shift) and was stuck so I pulled out the Haynes repair manual as started looking through it.  My dad walked in the room and asked what I was doing.  I asked him "how does a transmission work?"  "why is yours broke?" he asked "no" I said, "I just want to know how it works."  When I said that his eyes lit up and he got a big smile on his face and he grabbed another book off the shelf and sat down next to me and started going on about RPMs and synchros.
My dad taught me a lot of things that are useful in my discipline and one of the most important things that he taught me about it was that I could do it, what ever "it" was.  This gave me the confidence that I needed to be comfortable with different tools and equipment, and the confidence that I could figure things out.  I learned that there isn't magic behind complex things, just science and design, which are at the heart of engineering and technology (OK, he did tell me that automatic transmissions operate on black magic).  I think that these things are important for student to have now-confidence and encouragement.  While I was at Mount Logan Middle School doing clinical work the kids were using the band saw to cut out CO2 cars and a lot of them were afraid so they would give their block of wood to their friend and tell them to go cut it out.  When I saw this I would tell the friend to go give the block back and have them come cut it out.  It's very dangerous to be afraid of the equipment, but it is important to "respect" it by knowing that it would win in a fight.  So I would assure the kids that there was nothing to be afraid of and they wouldn't get hurt if they obeyed all of the safety rules.  After cutting out the cars almost all of them said "Hey, this is fun!" and every single one of them admitted it wasn't scary afterwards.

So, those are some things that I learned from home that apply to school stuff.