Kid Ethnic: Mixed-Race Adventures in Japan: Infectious: The Screaming Man in the Four-Stroke Engine

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

* * *

The Elegant Young Man Who Suggests that We Drink | A Brief Prophecy Concerning Watermelon Hats