I deal with some serious sh*t! High voltage electrical systems are like that. Oh, yeah, they’ll roll on for decades, benignly doing the jobs for which they were designed, but do something wrong and —-BOOM!—- metals vaporize in globes of incandescent plasma, propelling molten blobs of iron and copper at supersonic speeds into your soft carcass. Injury and death ensues.

So I need to educate people. I do this all the time. It’s my job. I do it in formal presentations, and I do it even more in impromptu settings throughout my workday on these projects. Before this, though, I was an instructor, drill sergeant, award-winning armor crewman instructor, in the army. I ***KNOW*** the craft of imparting knowledge.

That’s what I find appalling about some of the recent revelations on the education front. Here’s the deal: ARMY: I don’t CARE how you learned it, just so you LEARN it. As in, I have just demonstrated how to disassemble the breechblock for the M68 105mm main gun. Private Snuffy, it’s YOUR turn. I will watch. Your two buddies will assist. And I would watch. And the buddies would assist, 1) because the job required extra hands unless you cheated and REALLY knew what you were doing and 2) because their turn was coming next. And he’d do it until he did it right, without verbal assistance.

And six weeks later at the end of the training cycle, he’d get to perform the same act under the watchful eye of an evaluator before he graduated. We did this for a hundred trainees at a time, starting with a new bunch every ten weeks. Our trainees had IQ’s ranging from probably 80 to 130. Some of these 130 guys learned because they could intuitively imagine the interactions and relationships of the various parts. Some of the 80 guys learned because I made ’em do it three times a day every time I saw them for six weeks. But they learned.

The Army, not having to justify the multi-million dollar budget of the College of Education at a university, distilled the whole idea of teaching to a series of classes called, oddly enough, Techniques of Military Instruction, happily distilled to “TMI”. This block fo instruciton was thrown into just about every leadership course the Army had. What? You’re learning to be a tank commander? There were TMI classes. New lieutenant doing your officer basic course for combat engineers? TMI. And heaven forbid that you should aspire to wear the campaign (Smokey Bear) hat of a drill sergeant. That was SIX horrible weeks, and MOST of it was spent making sure YOU could get one of those 80 IQ’s to march and perform basic military functions. But the basic premise is that becoming a “trainer”, the army version of “educator” was integrated into the particular specialty to which one was assigned. It didn’t take four years. Some were better at it than others. But it was done.

And that’s why i can’t figure out (actually, I **CAN** figure it out, but I’m too nice a guy to say it) why we seem to have so much trouble with educating kids. Let’s take something basic in math, like multiplication tables. I personally don’t care if you have a complete understanding of sets and the history of mathematics from the Babylonian clay tablets to the present day. I want to see that when I say 8×7=?, you can immediately say “56” without employing the calculator function on your cellphone. 100% of the time.If you haven’t got THAT act down pat, then, sorry, bunkie, you don’t get out of the fourth grade. PERIOD!!!!

If you can’t take the measurements of a a box in inches and tell me how many gallons it’ll hold, then you don’t get out of the eighth grade. PERIOD!!!!

If you can’t do a 75% on the US constitution, then you don’t get to VOTE. PERIOD!!!! And to run for office, you need a ninety.

I want, in my business of implementing real hardware using laws incontrovertible no matter which party is in the legislature, for YOU to be able to do a few physical measurements and determine if it makes sense that twelve hundred amps can flow through a copper bus bar a quarter of an inch thick and two inches wide without overheating.

If you can’t do that, then I don’t care how good you feel about yourself, you just ain’t making it in my world.

I don’t care, folks, if it seems archaic and structured to have the entire class in fourth grade standing beside their desks, reciting together “Six times eight is forty-eight”. I do care that, at the end of the day, if the little darlin’ sees 6×8=___, that he can write “48”.

I don’t care that he has to look at “He be/am/is/are swimming.” and think that it’s an affront to ten generations of mutilation of the English language by his antecedents, I want to see a test paper that says “He be/am/is/are swimming.” because when I get this young luminary as a technician, I expect to see a written report that doesn’t require cross-training in Ebonics to evaluate.

Folks, I am, according to some of my younger co-workers, a dinosaur. But you know, these young co-workers are engineers and THEY can do the things I opine upon,and they with brilliant facility. We live in a world that runs on technologies behind the scenes that the average WalMartian never even suspects. I exist in a world of amps and volts and devices that seem like alien technology to much of humanity. I need people following me. The kids that are in schools today are going to be on YOUR infrastructure tomorrow, keeping the lights on, the gas flowing, the sewage processed (Yeah, YUCK! But don’t do it and see what happens…) the planes in the air, and a million other tasks.

And feeling good is optional until the lights are back on.