Story a day

I've decided to make the blogger my more official journal. As such I've resolved to make this a place for a story a day. If I have an exceptionally boring day I may go backward in time and spout off a story of my youth and childhood.

Today's story is of a TA, that's me. I was very pleased to note that the students in my class did much better on their lab assignments this time around. I TA for a Civil Engineering Strength of Materials class. It's a lab class so every Tuesday I TA two lab sessions where we do cool stuff like break things. And when I say break things I mean we take solid steel bars and stick them in machines that bend or pull or twist them until they break. I almost died that way once. Every week or so the students turn in a lab report. This lab report is graded on a pretty strict level of standards. For example, if all of your tables and graphs aren't centered with the right fonts of the exact right sizes you lose points from the lab report grade. Minutia counts big time. Last week I had the job of grading the said minutia and then handing back the report grades to my student. Gosh, right when I was starting to form a bond of trust with them I hand them back an assignment where the average grade was 65%. That's tough. But I'm happy to report that I just went through their second lab report and this time around they got an average of 90% or so. It's heartening and I'm sure it will be a big morale boost for them. Their next lab report won't be due for another week as it's a combined lab, the last lab and the one we're doing tomorrow, so they'll have a little break, a chance to figure out what they've done wrong up until now and hopefully they'll be happy campers come a couple weeks from now when I hand back those reports with the grades on them.

Since I mentioned a near death experience I may as well relate it, eh? (no I'm not from Canada, I just like the way Canadians use the word "eh?") When I was a student in this class I enjoyed the torsion lab immensely. In the torsion lab we take a foot long piece of steel and stick it in a machine with two drums. It's locked into place so it won't roll around relative to the drums, kind of like putting a pair of vice-grips on either end. Then one of the drums is rotated steadily and the force used to rotate it is measured. The steel twists about 9-10 time before breaking. The temperature sky-rockets from room temperature to about 120 or 150 degrees (F). Finally it makes a nice clean break. Then we do the same for cast iron. Cast iron is way, way wossier than steel. It's also brittle. When steel breaks in torsion it's a flat break just like the bar got a new ending. When cast iron breaks it's a spiral fracture. Well sometimes when this spiral fracture happens it snaps back, like a rubber band. This snapping can cause a shard of the cast iron to fly off the specimen out at a random direction. When I was a student I was watching it closely. SNAP! A chunk of cast iron flies straight at my eye, faster than I can react to. Thankfully we had a shield over the whole contraption, harmlessly knocking it down. I tell you what, I owe my life, or at least my eye, to that thing.