Unexpectedness

Here’s one of our favorite stories so far from the “100 books for 100 stories” contest. There are still plenty of books to giveaway, so make sure to tell your teacher friends: Email us — heaths@fastcompany.com — a story of a lesson that stuck and we’ll ship you a free signed copy of our book. (Must be a U.S. resident and a current teacher.)

Check out this tale from Saleem Reshamwala (a few comments below the story):

When I was a middle school student in Apex, North Carolina, I took a class called “Small Engines” with a guy named Mr. Trueblood. It was basically a class in how to repair lawnmowers, and a stepping-stone class for learning how to fix cars.

Here’s the four steps in making a four-stroke engine (the one in most cars) go:

1) Piston goes down, gas and air mixture gets sucked into the cylinder
2) Piston goes up, compresses gas and air (makes gas and air mix more explosive)
3) gas explodes piston is forced down (this is the explosion that makes your car go)
4) Piston goes up (exhaust is pushed out)

I don’t think a single one of us understood that about cars before we started the class. So, Mr. Trueblood tells us, a group of middle-school boys in rural North Carolina, that he’s going to teach us the basic science of how a four-stroke engine works. We’re expecting him to go to the blackboard with the chalk. He walks out of the room.

1) He then walks back in giving a monologue as if he were a mix of gas and air that had been sucked into a car engine. “Woah, got sucked in here, it’s not so bad lots of space to move around” and he’s kind of moving around the class a bit, acting as if he’s talking to various particles around the room. It’s a little weird, and some of the boys are laughing.

2) Then he starts acting as if the back wall of the class is moving toward him. He gets really into it. Laughing nervously at first, talking about how the piston is making things get really crowded for him and the other particles. Then he briefly looks genuinely scared. He’s talking about how being this crowded in, all he wants to do is anything he can to get out.

At this point, a few of us were like, ‘Uh, what the hell is going on here’

3) He yells something about a fire coming in the side of the class, and then SCREAMS and SPRINTS toward the back of the room, yelling that he’s burning. I was kind of terrified at this point. He looked crazy. And, like I said, he’s yelling about having come into contact with flame.

4) He slams himself into the back wall, stops acting crazy, and just acts like he’s exhausted, mentions how shocked he is at the force that he was able to push the piston away with, acts like it’s coming back towards him, and then walks out the classroom door.

I can’t remember if we clapped or not, but I know we all laughed. Nervously. And it sure as hell taught the concept.

There’s a lot to love about this: Note how the teacher is trying to turn a complex process into a concrete story. He is trying to get students to experience the four-stroke engine. And the fact that he freaks them out a little is just gravy. Also note that the initial student reaction to the, er, performance is not particularly positive. Sticky ideas won’t always get instant acclaim, and yet it wins in the end — here’s a guy who still remembers the details of a class from middle school!

I conducted a workshop recently for high school science and math teachers. We were working together to find ways to make their lesson plans stickier. My favorite example came from a couple of teachers who were trying to revamp the oceanography unit. Below is my own paraphrasing of what they said:

“We weren’t happy with how our unit on oceanography went last year. So we’ve put a lot of energy into how to make it better. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

In the first class in the unit, we start with a mystery: Let’s say you put a message in a bottle, drive out to the coast, and throw it as far as you can into the ocean. Where will the bottle end up? We let students make their guesses. (‘The waves will bring it right back to shore.’ ‘It’ll end up in Antarctica.’ ‘It’ll sink.’ Etc.) But we don’t give an answer (since there isn’t a clear answer).

Then we began to explore this same mystery in a more dramatic form. We’ll have students read a wonderful article from Harper’s magazine. What happened is this: In January 1992, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a cargo ship hit a severe storm lost a container overboard which held 7,200 packages of plastic toys, including thousands of rubber duckies. Years later, we know where many of these rubber duckies ended up. In fact, many of them ended up on the same beach! By tracing the paths that these duckies swam, we learn a lot about the way ocean currents work.

Next, we let the kids do some hands-on experimentation. We’ll set up tanks of water with different salinities and different temperatures, and let them see how those variables change the water current. In essence, we are letting them create their own ocean currents.

Finally, we’ll pivot to the critical role that oceans play with global climate. We’ll start by asking them: What determines the weather of a city, like New York City? Inevitably, students say it depends on the latitude of the city ‘ the closer to the equator the city is, the warmer it is, and the closer to the poles it is, the colder it is. There is much truth to that, but there are huge discrepancies: For instance, New York City and Madrid are at roughly the same latitude. Yet it snows every winter in NYC and doesn’t snow in Madrid. What’s the difference? That paves our way to talk about the way that ocean currents influence climate.

We will be trying this ‘new & improved’ sequence this fall, and we’re hopeful it will make the unit much more vivid for students!”

From an article on nice-but-cheap bottles of wine in the NYT:

Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in [the $10 or under category], down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples. …

Here’s what I find remarkable about this: The writer, Eric Asimov, isn’t saying anything that should be shocking when he points out the impossibility of finding the 10 best wines under $10. And yet it stopped me in my tracks. In saying the obvious, he became much more credible to me. Because most of the other “best-of” lists you see don’t concede their obvious limitations. “Hey, look, it’s absurd to think that we’ve found the best 10 albums of the year, out of thousands that were released…” Asimov’s admission made me more curious, not less, to hear what he had to say.

It reminds me of the sales world. We’ve all come across salespeople who are reluctant to admit any weakness in their product or service, no matter how insignificant. As many a sales guru has pointed out, building trust involves being candid, and being candid involves admitting that your products aren’t flawless.

Admitting weakness can, oddly enough, make your core ideas more powerful.

The research is in on Baby Einstein videos: “For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.”

Concrete enough for ya? But if the enduring appeal of the discredited “Mozart Effect” is any guide, we’re still in for a long debate on this one. It takes parents a long time to become as disillusioned as they should be.

Here’s MojoMom explaining why Gen X parents love Baby Einstein (and why they shouldn’t). And here’s Chip debunking the Mozart Effect.

Chip and I had an incredible time in Tanzania. So, let me start by saying this: You know that feeling you get when a full explanation would take 25,000 words, but you’ve only got 500, and you’re afraid to oversimplify, but you’re also afraid to give a vague “neat experience” summary, and this causes a cycle of anxiety and actually deters you from writing anything…? So, yeah, that’s the feeling I’ve got.

Let me start at the end: In conjunction with an amazing team of collaborators (more on them in a sec), we cooked up 2 campaigns that will likely be pilot-tested within 6 months. One campaign is intended to encourage Tanzanians to get tested for HIV. (The push for testing was recently given a huge boost by the Tanzanian president, who courageously made a well-publicized visit to a clinic to get tested. The number of tests spiked immediately afterward. And, as a further tangent, his action is a classic situation in which external credibility is more effective than idea stickiness.) The core of the “get tested” campaign is this: That getting tested is an act of solidarity with your fellow Tanzanians. It’s good for the country.

In the prototype posters we hatched, you see pairs of dissimilar Tanzanians (such as a grandma and granddaughter, or a Masai and a manager) who are clutching hands in a show of unity. Around their wrists are colorful bands that signify that they’ve been tested (a la LiveStrong). And the headline is, roughly, “We are Tanzanians.” [For those who have read MTS, we were consciously making an identity appeal with this campaign, similar to Don’t Mess With Texas. See the Emotion chapter. So many AIDS-related campaigns appeal solely to consequences — live longer, reduce your anxiety, it’s quick and easy, you can prevent harm for others, etc. We felt that an identity appeal could provide a stronger motivation.]

The other campaign is intended to combat the common phenomenon of cross-generational relationships. In the stereotypical case, an older male with money and status finds himself a young mistress (often as young as 18 or 19) and maintains a long-term-ish “sugar daddy” type relationship with her. These relationships provide a route for HIV to spread between dissimilar populations, which creates a nasty epidemiological problem. Now, certainly this kind of relationship exists in the Western world. But there’s a counterforce: Social taboos. If a 50 year-old guy is hitting on an 18 year-old, our Pathetic Alarm goes off. Nasty looks are offered. People whisper about the lecher behind his back. But there’s no real equivalent of this taboo in Tanzania — there’s no common language of scorn or disgust or distaste to invoke against these situations.

So, in the second campaign, we introduce a villainous character named Fataki (Swahili for “explosion” or “fireworks” — i.e., keep your distance from this dude). Fataki is a wealthy, powerful guy who is irredeemably sleazy. Comically sleazy. He hits on anything that moves — schoolgirls, strangers, other mens’ wives. In the campaign — which would include posters and radio spots — we’ll try to make people laugh at Fataki’s shamelessness, and also, importantly, at the repeated rejections he receives (think Wile E. Coyote). As the tagline of the campaign will read, “He’s constantly hitting on women. He won’t wear a condom. He won’t get tested. DON’T LET YOUR LOVED ONES GET MIXED UP WITH A FATAKI.”

Our hope is that “Fataki” will enter the lexicon. Our dream is that a year or two from now, we could return to Tanzania and overhear someone in a bar, saying about someone else, “He’s such a Fataki.”

Working on these campaigns was one of the most fun and satisfying moments since the book launch. And what made it fun and satisfying was the company we had: Our hosts, Pam and Mike, from USAID, the branch of the State Department that would lead the launch of these campaigns. Bob (affiliated with Johns Hopkins), who helped organize and lead our work. Plus a half-dozen AIDS-education experts who’ve been working in the region and were willing to share their knowledge and experience. And a hell of a Tanzanian creative team — approximately a dozen scriptwriters, producers, artists, and actors — who helped us develop and produce the campaign mockups, which in turn gave us something concrete to present to the decision-makers. (The process of producing creative work, with conversations constantly translated between English and Swahili, is probably worth another blog post.)

Okay, I’m gonna shut up now. Thanks to those of you who sent encouraging notes to us. We’ll continue to post updates to track the progress of the campaigns.