Ripped from the Headlines, Part Deux!

CO2 levels the highest ever measured. The last time there was this much CO2 in the air, Titanis terror birds roamed the Earth.

An extra tidbit: a study surveying half a million workers found that physically demanding jobs will help you live longer.

Warmup Question: Why are Bioswales an example of green building? (responses)

LEED link

Apply table and graph reading skills to solve three green trades math problems:

• Heat Transfer through a Wall
• Solar Panels
• Geothermal Pumps

What follows are the procedures for calculating how green a building is.

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Green Math Calculations

Let’s start with

Heat Transfer through a Wall. You’ll need to find three numbers:

1. The Thermal Conductivity number, given building material.
2. The Area the heat gradient is going through. We will use one of three rooms.
3. The “delta T” — the change in temperature. Each problem will give you two temperatures. Do the takeaway.

And now Solar Panels. You’ll need to find, … another three numbers:

1. The Insolation number, given city and month.
2. The number of daylight hours.
3. The area of the solar panel in square meters.

And finally, Heat Pumps. Another three numbers:

1. Mass Flow Rate. Given in the problem.
2. Heat Capacity of the coolant.
3. Another delta T.

That’s it for Green Trades Math.

Getting up at 4AM to be on time for your 1^st shift has its agonies, but as any journeyperson can recall from one point of their life or another, once you coast into your momentum for the day, catch your second wind, you can reach epiphanies about the course you are charting. Keeping the apprenticeship tradition afloat during the COVID tsunami — I have already explicated the agony. But by the end of our last class, I started falling into the Goldilocks Zone.

Workers seek to improve their skills. To minimize unskilled labor. To provide for their families. To see how far they can go into the starry night (OT doubles after 12). My worker experiences so far with this class: after the agony, a rapturous data beam, pointing the way like a pole star, tacking towards a better quality of life.

First column: Every hand shall be in the box. Huzzah! for T. Jones, getting the high score. But that’s not how the apprenticeship tradition should be respected. K. Harris, et. al., had a lower score, but everybody on their team represented, so their team submitted the best work product. respect.

Second column: Performance spectrum among the groups. How did our group perform? What and how much could we have improved upon? Learning how to efficiently submit work product was clearly a learning curve our first time in Breakout. Let’s improve on that skill! Hopefully today, one submission only per group.

Question #5 clearly offered the most challenge for the entire class. I will begin today’s class workshopping solution strategies.

Measuring your skills objectively, learning from your mistakes, building a better mousetrap, that’s how skilled laborers live their lives. Let’s learn together. Nail penetration & Screw holes.

6/2 On our way to finishing the last BIG class I will teach until we’re on this year’s other side for 60 degree weather (an ideal Memorial Day for me, misty and chilly at night) — I already feel like I’m living on Proxima Centauri. So far this year, 134 (73 + 15 + 26 + 20) students have passed through my online classrooms. I asked you yesterday, what did they learn? “Logging on early” means a “working lunch”? You are apprentices, in a worker education program that values “hands on” as the primary mode of instruction: isn’t all that “virtual hands on” can be is a misnomer?

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week:

• Today (6/2): LCT Missing Sides. No notch counting. Less than does not mean the right sided alligator mouth. A penny nail will go through how far. Choosing the right drill bit when screwing.
• Tomorrow (6/3): All assignments to date DUE 8AM. The first 45 minutes of the class will be “free form,” that is, any student can ask any question about any mistake they made on their homework.¹
• Friday (6/4): 2 hour assessment of first week trades math skills.

My biggest takeaway from our class yesterday was the connection made between “simple” and “complex” learning. Why I have made a life choice teaching trades math (besides respecting workers), is that, despite moronic public perceptions about “shop math,” it is easy to delve deep into a many millenium’d tradition. Trades math is real, many math classes are not.

We will experience this reality, first with LCTs, and then with nail penetration and screw holes. I know you can hardly wait. I can’t wait to finish this class and be that much closer to drydocking the ubercrawl for summer.

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¹ The apprenticeship tradition is like a personal conveyance, from the journeyman, to the apprentice. It stands to reason, therefore, that even in a virtual environment, individualized assessments should continue to be de rigueur in online apprenticeship programs. As I cycled through the 10 Breakout rooms yesterday, I sensed that for some, not having the same assessment as everybody else was a surprise. As apprentices, you should always expect that kind of value of/for you, another worker.

Even something as pure as mathematics has been laid low by COVID. In a Zoom class, calculators must be allowed, because there is no way to prevent their use, without excessive surveillance, which is anathema to the apprenticeship tradition.

This class, a pre-apprenticeship class, heightens the importance of developing “soft skills,” skills that also are not conducive to remote learning. “Working lunch,” a time where highly motivated apprentices could gain additional time with their journeymen, now only means logging in early.

Over the past year, we at CWE have endeavored to migrate our values and traditions onto this Learning Management System (LMS). We have designed it to protect your privacy. Its structure is to encourage group work and discussion. A workflow process has been designed to ensure that each apprentice will receive unique assessments.