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Serious Wisdom from John Ratzenberger
John Ratzenberger was one of the first people I met on my first day in show business. For those of you under, say, 40, he played Cliff Clavin, the talkative fantasist letter carrier on Cheers, which was my first job as a professional writer. (For those of you who would like to contribute to the Rob Long Residual Fund, feel free to buy the entire series here.) He was a lovely and smart guy back then. He still is. Here is his latest column for Time, in which he expounds on a subject he’s deeply passionate about:
The whole process of knowing how to make things, fix things and build things, fascinated me to the point that, by the time I was 14 years old, I had decided that I wanted to learn how to build a house and everything in it. In fact, I built the first couch I ever owned for my first real apartment. It may not have won any beauty contests, but it sure was comfortable. I ultimately saw my childhood goal of building a house come to fruition, many times over, while working as a house-framer before I landed the role of “Cliff” on Cheers.
Read the whole thing, but here’s the kicker:
We take for granted that this great symphony of things we use every day will continue to exist. Why else would many school systems nationwide cancel the very shop and home economic courses that gave us the generation we crown as “the greatest”? For close to 30 years now we have been graduating students who go on to college without knowing how to read a ruler, use a screw driver or change a tire. We’ve raised an entire generation of narcissists with low self-esteem, posting countless “selfies” in a constant pursuit of validation.
You want children to experience self-esteem? Teach them the rudiments of creating something from scratch. Let them experience the pride they’ll have in knowing they made something real—not a code on a computer, but something they can hold in their hands and use. Develop their innate common sense by thinking through the obstacles intrinsic in building something. As we push our children to become better “thinkers,” don’t ignore the side of their brain that longs to “tinker.” It’s going to take some discipline and interest on your part. So put down your iPhone, turn off the TV and pick up a tool kit. Make something! You owe it your kid—and to yourself.
True enough.
Image Credit: “JohnRatzenberger08RIIFF” by Mary Hanley of the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in Education
I can touch my desk and other real-world things I have made. I can run my programs, but it is not the same feel to it. That is all.
I doubt John Ratzenberger has ever tried programming a computer. It’s mentally very similar to the process of mechanical or electrical design.
I’ve spent much of my life designing electronic musical instruments. When I started in the late 70s, they were all resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. The last one I designed, over the past few years as a hobby project, is mostly code. It didn’t involve any less tinkering (a.k.a. debugging), cleverness, effort, clear thinking, intuition, etc. It’s just a little less physical. (A lot less physical than pure mechanical construction.)
I’ve often thought that I was “born to code”, but that if I had been born a hundred years earlier, I would have been a mechanical designer. As a programmer, I feel right at home with gears, pistons, governors, servos, valves, and so on.
So I generally agree with John, but he shouldn’t feel that all those kids “tinkering” with Android apps of their own, or making a Raspberry Pi do something useful, aren’t learning practical abilities, or creating something “real”.
It isn’t – it’s just symbolic.
“Would you please step in and give a lecture on neutron diffusion theory to the Explorer Scout Post here at our Westinghouse Nuclear Energy Division? The guy who was to do this is unable to be there.” From there – and I’m still unclear on just how it happened – I inherited the Post for the next three years. Drawing from six area high schools, we had 60-65 juniors and seniors/year. They were given a two-year course in nuclear engineering – sufficient for them to travel to Penn State to perform the start-up of the test reactor there. This in addition to normal teenage activities: weekend ski trips, road rallies, all night bowling parties, spelunking, etc. The kids themselves were not only their schools’ academic leaders, but also the athletic and social leaders. A truly remarkable bunch. (Two years prior, the Explorer of the Year for the entire country came from our Post.)
Mr. Wizard had built a basic steam generating demonstration model and produced an accompanying film for a local utility. I gathered several project managers for lunch in a conference room, showed the film, and asked if it were possible for the kids, in teams, to replicate the models with their project management guidance. Yes was their answer.
Cont.
Eight teams and 16 project managers later, the competition was on. We gave each team $25 (Mr. Wizard had charged the utility $25,000), together with the contest rules drawn up by two recent graduate student graduates. Real world project engineering was stressed: budgets submitted, schedules prepared, progress reports made (taking into account proprietary information), etc.
Originally intending to only light a small lightbulb – which all of them did – the resulting models were so successful that they were used by the division for nuclear acceptance presentations throughout the country.
The pride all of the kids felt when they were judged at the dinner for them by the VP and General Manager of the division (and two others) was increased when they were informed that their principals had said that evening that any participating Post member would be excused from their senior science project because of their tremendous effort on this one.
PS Most of them went on to the top schools in the country.
Rob, if you really want the youth to know who you are talking about, tell them that he’s Hammie from Toy Story, P.T. Flea from A Bug’s Life, the Abominable Snowman from Monsters, Inc., Mr. Skate from Finding Nemo, Mack from Cars, John from WALL-E…
And how do you know that, exactly? He could just as easily mean the billions of lines of code that go into creating World of Warcraft itself, a monumental achievement requiring untold skilled man-hours.
Wow. Just … wow.
Because in English we don’t usually put indefinite articles in front of verbs. “A code.” Furthermore, the the parallel structure of the sentence, contrasting something real that they made and hold in their hand to something that they didn’t make and exists only in virtual reality implies that the object of comparison is a noun.
If it will make you feel better, I would agree with you that the programmer who makes WoW should feel just as much accomplishment as the carpenter who makes a chair. But I don’t think that’s what is in view here.
Come on – I was actually proud of it. Not the actual joke – just what it represented.