This weekend I'm participating in Engineering Day at the Adventure Science Center here in Nashville through work. A bunch of different companies and organizations will be there and the idea is to provide fun activities for the kids to learn something about science and engineering.
Now I know what you're saying: "Dude, you hate/are terrified of children. Why the hell are you doing this?"
You're absolutely right and I wouldn't be doing this if the court order wasn't forcing me. Actually that's not true. There isn't a judge on the planet that would force me to spend time with kids in a teaching environment.
"In other news, several dozen local parents got a rather rude surprise today when their children returned from the Engineering Day at the Adventure Science center. When asked what they learned, all the children produced an apparently empty plastic bottle and instructed their parents to open it. What the got, it turns out, was a very smelly surprise. Apparently in addition to learning about such engineering principles as lift, drag, buoyancy, and propulsion, the children also learned how to capture their own flatulence in a plastic bottle..."
Anyway, our activity is to teach the kids about lift and drag by having them make gliders out of construction paper and straws to see how far they can make them fly. When I originally volunteered for this I thought I'd just have to show up to make sure none of the kids ate any of the glue. Come to find out I actually have to put some work into this shit. When I returned to my desk at one point today I found a huge stack of construction paper and a massive pile of straws sitting on my chair with instructions to cut the paper into thin strips and unwrap all of the straws. I just stood there looking at the hundreds of straws thinking, why did we purchase a bunch of straws with paper wrappers on them? Don't the straws typically come through the manufacturing process without paper wrappers? Then they go through another manufacturing process to put the wrappers on? So now I have to take them off again? Couldn't we have interrupted that manufacturing process early on to get some naked straws? Aren't we engineers? Shouldn't this be efficient? Is it me? Am I the stupid one here?
It took me 20 minutes each to cut the paper and unwrap the straws. What a colossal waste of my time. Once I had 500 unwrapped straws in front of me the only thing I could think was, "I wonder how many of these I can fit in my mouth at once?"
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The whole time I was doing that shit I was thinking, why am I cutting this paper and unwrapping the straws myself. Why not, in addition to teaching the kids about engineering, teach them a little something about work ethic? "Alright you bastards, gather round, grab some paper, and start cutting it up into little strips... What? You don't have scissors? Use your teeth. There, I just taught you something about ingenuity too... Oh, what now? Your glider won't fly? Good, you just learned about failure. Stick with me and you'll learn a lot of life's lessons your parents would like to pretend don't exist... Bobby! Stop pulling that girl's pigtails; you don’t want to mess with her, she's going to be pregnant before you get your driver's license..."
In reality I am kind of looking forward to this but holy shit, I need to learn something about lift and drag before I get there this weekend. The last thing I want to do is tell some kid he's retarded for using 9 straws instead of 2 to make his glider then watch him launch it for a couple hundred yards.
I'd hate for that kid to also learn what a perfectly executed roundhouse to the face feels like.
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