Monday, August 28, 2006

I Married an Engineer

There's this little boy (a special needs child) that joins our 3rd grade class for brief periods during the day - P.E., lunch, and recess. He has this little quirk where he sometimes gets the urge to charge people like a bull. To help avoid this problem, he's required to wear a weighted vest. The thinking is that the weight of the vest will slow him down, and I guess give other students AND teachers the chance to move out of the way when they see him coming. So I explained this to Alan whose first question was, "yeah, but won't the extra weight make the impact hurt more?"

He then brings this up at work to a few other engineers and says that every engineer responds the same way. "Doesn't that make him hit harder?" "The weight will increase the force of the impact." "But force = mass x acceleration...." And so on.

By the way, I've yet to see this boy charge, but he does have a strange look in his eyes.

4 comments:

mel... said...

Yea, I'd be working on your matador moves just in case.

DeeBee said...

I don't know what's funnier, imaging this little boy charging people or Alan's group of engineers calculating how the vest can't possibly help the situation.
I love it.

DeeBee said...

I think I spelled "imagining" wrong. Maybe Alan and his group can work on the probability of this word being spelled wrong.

her said...

I was thinking the same thing as Alan. All the kid has to do is find someone off guard. Good luck with that.