A Practicality Joke

Had a cathartic experience tonight complaining about how impractical my civil engineering department is with my senior design teammates...like, why the heck is the extent of our AutoCAD education a few short lab sessions in 312 and a little project...when this is in fact something very practical in our field, in pretty much every sub-discipline?

Why don't we have a class that actually teaches us how to read/prepare engineering drawings and site plans? Seriously? All we have is a construction management class in which we're given a stack of drawings and are more or less left to figure them out on our own, and that's only a small part of the super-crazed and rushed lab section; it's not even the focus of the class.

A bigger question: why don't we ever have design projects in our classes at all until senior design (apart from maybe a feeble notion of a design problem in the homework sets of some of the senior/grad level electives--at least in my concentration)? Surely it would be possible to invent a little project of designing a water treatment plant, or a piping system, or a simple structure, or something along the way, and not just at the end.

I refuse to accept that such a curriculum is not possible because we "only get our feet wet" in a lot of topics. Sure, an undergrad program in civil engineering isn't the same as a master's in a sub-discipline...but what's going on here if we really don't have time for design in an engineering program. Like, hold the phone, sister--what's the actual definition of engineering? Is it learning a bunch of methods that will solve for some nebulous quantity or parameter? Or is it actually about applying science to solve problems, in a way that involves volition and sometimes some creativity?

What would really make sense would be for classes to have a major design problem to, effectively, be the narrative thread through which the class is taught, in order to contextualize new topics and integrate various methods into one overarching purpose. For example: Hello, welcome to the first day of CEE 421, Fundamentals of Hydrology and Hydraulics! My name is Professor Helpful. So, to get us started, let me introduce a scenario that will point to the need for us to study hydrology/hydraulics and that will help us understand all the topics I'm going to introduce over the course of the semester. [Brings up diagram on PowerPoint slide.] Let's say we have a small office building with a 20,000 square foot parking lot. The building is at the bottom of a hill, so it's going to gather a lot of runoff when it rains, right? Why is this a problem? [Waits around for a response...] Well, we don't want there to be flooding around the building, right? So we're going to have to find a way to drain it, and in order to do that, we're going to need to know how much water we're going to have to handle--in terms of a total and in terms of volumetric flow--in order to design a system that will take care of it. That, in essence, is what hydrology's about. Now, once we've got our water collected--it's flowed into our drain and now it's in a pipe, and it's flowing down a pipe...do we know how the flow will act? Do we know how fast it will go and how high the water level will be as a function of the velocity? How is this related to the slope of the pipe, the shape of the pipe, and the roughness of the pipe? These are the kinds of things that hydraulics is concerned with. We'll use these things to figure out how best to design a system of drains, pipes, and detention storage for the excess runoff to best handle the water. Throughout the semester, we'll come back and refer to this example as we solve each component of our problem of how to deal with this runoff. First, let's figure out how we can know how much water we'll be dealing with by using the rational method...

Here's more of what actually happens: Hello, welcome to the first day of CEE 421, Fundamentals of Hydrology and Hydraulics. So, here's a video of a flood. [Plays video]. Yeah, so floods are pretty bad, right? This class has to do with dealing with floods in some general way that can be understood very shallowly by the way I'm going to scratch into some surface material that sets up some definitions that you expect are going to build the foundation for a very logical proceeding into deeper material, but then I'll actually just start throwing some methods at you willy-nilly. OK, first, let's define a watershed...

Look, I've appreciated a lot in all of my classes and there's a good number of professors whom I've enjoyed learning from, and I know I have learned a solid amount that will be useful in the future...but the sad thing is that when I think back to all the classes I've had in my department, the second scenario seems to have been true most of the time. Maybe I'm being unfair and the professor was really trying their best to present things in a way that would make sense, and I was just too dumb to get it, and now it's easy for me to take shots because everything's 20-20 in hindsight, right? I know I haven't been the perfect student either...far from it, really. I've showed up late for more classes than I can count, and I've missed and rushed homework assignments.

But I don't think that's the case. I think I actually would have understood it even less had it not been for a bit of exposure I had to storm sewers in my internship. I think the burden of this academic life would feel a lot lighter if I had a sense of cohesiveness between all of the things I was learning. If I wasn't just pounding out math problems night after night, problems that technically aren't purely theoretical like in a calculus class, but that are so pigeonholed and narrow, that they're analogous to learning how to bake a cake first by taking eggs and putting them in the oven, then separately taking some sugar and putting it in the oven, then separately taking chocolate and putting it in the oven...I think you get the picture.

I know I'm no expert engineer here. I may end up looking back at this in a year when I'm working for some company and think...boy, was I wrong, and who was I to question the university's way? But when I went into my internship experience last summer, finding it to be an experience vastly different from almost everything I'd done in school, and only having made a modest improvement upon that now in my senior year...I find myself questioning...why in the world is that? I have to hope that's only natural.

Thermo.

About a year ago I entered into a cash-prize poetry contest that my engineering college sponsored. I had a small collection of poems that I'd already written, which I went through and selected from to make my 5-poem submission portfolio. I was mostly satisfied with the material I'd chosen...and yet I found myself wanting to write a new poem to submit. One just for this contest, and one specifically about engineering.

It didn't take too long to realize that the perfect way to do this was to convert the severe frustration (and ultimate relief) I'd recently had in my thermodynamics class in verse form.

I could try to be modest here, but to be honest, after I finished the poem, I thought for sure I'd written a winner, and that the judges (who I assumed would have engineering backgrounds) would eat it up and grant me an award. Alas, no such fortune was found.

Ah well, anyway, here it is. I'm still happy with it:

Thermo

I am the working fluid.

I am the working fluid and I am being spent.

What’s that, you say? I can’t be exhausted?

Something about conservation of mass?

The truth you know is flaky and frosted.

I may be water by three-quarters

But that doesn’t mean my body

Follows a textbook chart’s orders

In fact, my specific counterexamples

To this possibility are sufficiently ample

I’m certain my internal energy is not the same

As when I first started this twisted game

Of relying on my own gumption

To discover a problem’s necessary assumptions

And although the pressure of the task has remained constant

And increasing volumes of demands are repeated

I am certain this has not in itself

Resulted in any work being completed.

As I run in my state of madness

In circles through temperature-entropy space

I find there’s complete reversibility

But, alas, not a hint of grace

For those who can only take exams

At a quasi-equilibrium pace…

And so after a semester filled

With pistons tightly sealed in cylinders

And valves closed firmly on rigid tanks

I thought that I myself would never find a way out

And then you made the final do-able—thanks.

Hell on a technicality and heaven in a handbasket

A few months ago I wrote this piece...I'm not sure exactly what you'd call it. It's kind of a poem, kind of a monologue.

The hell on a technicality idea is about a sort of fear that's associated with a strict Calvinist theology, and kind of being afraid that something you did wrong in the past and forgot about and thus neglected to confess to God proves that you are actually not elect, not regenerate. (I'll note that I am at odds with strict Calvanism because I think there are better interpretations of Scripture that don't produce this fear that I don't believe would come from the God whose perfect love casts out all fear.)

The heaven in a handbasket idea is a similar thought but in the opposite sense--it's kind of like you're trying to assemble your own little basket of heaven and you sort of fear that you're forgetting about something good and that your basket is never going to be perfect unless you have every little tiny thing. It's an idea that I encountered as I was cleaning out my bedroom at home this last summer in the anticipation that I may never live there again (depending on what I do after I graduate), and mulling over what was worth keeping.

Well, here it is:

Hell on a technicality and heaven in a handbasket. The basket was woven by your mother, you asked whether it would make it down the river and said it was the same kind that carried Moses down the Nile.

Your basket is full of random stuff, the random stuff in your room that’s still there, sitting on the floor smiling at you like a stupid kid who thinks you promised you would play. Still sitting there, drooling, maybe just rescued from a corner or from underneath a stack of magazines as you go through the process of cleaning out your childhood room for the last time like you’re preparing for your own death. You must put everything in the handbasket. Heaven forbid something escapes the handbasket.

Hell on a technicality came in the 8^th inning of the softball game on that field you walked by that one time when you were twelve years old, tucked between your town’s tiny little power plant and a secluded pond but plain as day on a map so you’ve got no excuses. The ump called a balk but the batter still swung so they needed a sacrifice and you were the only one riding the pine. Actually, you weren’t there, but someone wrote your name on the lineup card, someone who had a crush on you in preschool who you didn’t share your candy bar with that one time has been writing your name on that lineup card for years, it’s always been in the back of your mind, kind of like that assignment you did in 9^th grade and you know you got away with cheating but you thought things like that just come out in the wash. Well sometimes they don’t and sometimes people remember and so they write your name down on a lineup card and you get hell on a technicality.

Heaven in a handbasket is simple for babies because they don’t need to take anything with them. But some people think if they go before their time they get hell on a technicality anyway so I don’t get how it works.

Heaven in a handbasket is something like a nomadic discipline and a suburban heritage, or anti-heritage, depending on how you look at it, the people who live in giant houses in the hills don’t know what it is. Oh, all the days you went looking for your Easter basket on those spring Sunday mornings, how you thought behind the curtains was such a difficult hiding spot, how upon finding it you rifled through each absurdly-shaped sweet snack and plush toy and pack of trading cards until they were scattered around the living room floor with thin plastic grass strewn about all of it, like someone had ripped apart a box of green cassette tapes—but no one ever told you you’d have to wind those tapes back up and play them back and that you’d be responsible for remembering exactly what had been lost in each place that the recording no longer played back clearly, that you’d have to load up the basket again at the start of autumn and the things you’d want to put in it you’d have to look much harder for than peeking in some gimme spot by the window and your mom won’t be giving you hot and cold signals, but that you’d had to find those things if you didn’t want to forget to bring the right book to study for the quiz and get the answer wrong and get hell on a technicality.

Hell on a technicality isn’t a police officer wrangling you down or a screech on the brakes, it’s not a straightforward scream in the face or a can of mace; it’s a letter in that P.O. box you forgot you even had from that city you visited that one time, or a phone call from someone you’ve never met asking when you’re coming home for dinner, it’s a bank account you opened when you were five and you didn’t know they charged you ten cents for that lollipop at the teller and so you were in the red and have been in it deep for years.

I loaded up my handbasket a few weeks ago tried to get into it and float away like Moses but there was no more room so I watched it slip down the stream. After a few minutes, I realized the one thing I forgot to put into it was my slow-pitch softball rule book. I opened it up the section on balks and started checking for exceptions to rules.