RSS / Atom

English twitter: @kidethnic

KID ETHNIC IS WRITTEN BY:

saleem reshamwla
who is fresh of the boat (that circled the globe).

He makes crazy stuff:

Zombie Rap Videos, Truly Strange Geographic Education Flicks, Micro-Documentaries About Chinese Cell Phone Markets...

kidethnic@gmail.com

日本語のtwitter: @masalasoccer

ALSO BY KID ETHNIC:

Twitter
I twitter infrequently. But hope we can stay friends.

SEAWEED BREAKFAST
A collection of stories about Japan written while part of the National Geographic Glimpse Correspondents' Training Program.

100JapaneseThings
A collaborative site to help folks (and each other) find Japanese stuff.

The Whiteboard Videos
Music+Whiteboard Markers+Friends=Good ways to spend weekends

The Annual Kid Ethnic Valentine
Because I love you so much.

The Alpaca Song
I wrote and recorded this for you. Because you <em>need</em> a song about alpacas, don&#8217;t you?

RSS / Atom

Subscribe with Bloglines

Infectious: The Screaming Man in the Four-Stroke Engine · 13 October 07

The guys at "Made to Stick" just posted a story I wrote about an old teacher of mine.

It's about the "Screaming Man" in the title of this post. You can read it and come back. I'll wait.

What I love about that story: You tell the story in a bar, it gets a laugh, and, suddenly, everyone knows about 4-stroke engines. Even the drunk guy who won't stop hitting on your girlfriend.

You can't even recount the dang thing without magically teaching people a fundamental lesson in auto-mechanics.

Just talking about the class teaches the lesson.

Contrast this with another great class that I once had, a physics class in which the teacher walked behind the school and shot potatoes out of a home made potato canon after explaining the propulsion and asking us to calculate how far we thought the potatoes would fly.

Now that is a splendid and possibly-illegal class.

But I just told you what we did in the class, and you didn't necessarily learn anything about physics. Whereas if you read about the four-stroke engine guy, the way the engine works is inherently there.

I'm suddenly curious about other stories like that, where in telling them, you can't help but convey the fundamentals of a topic. They're like amoral fables, where the only moral is, uh, science.

| Permanent link to this

* * *

|