Understanding Relationships is Key

During the quiet times between quarters, our team members will often discuss what students are struggling with, what WE are struggling with, and look for ways to address these issues. The other day we were discussing why many students have such a difficult time learning how to identify the common, start, and run terminals on compressors. A few other problem areas came up – reading diagrams, superheat, subcooling, and system charge compared to superheat and subcooling. Then it struck me what all these things had in common – they are all relationships. You have to compare two or more pieces of information to arrive at a solution. Over my years of teaching, I have noticed that the more abstract a concept is, the more students struggle with it. Identifying components is usually not a problem because that is very concrete, just putting a name with something you can see and touch. Memorizing definitions is also fairly straightforward, even if it is not very exciting. Most students can give us a pretty good definition of superheat. But we lose many of them when they have to actually measure it on a unit. We lose even more when they have to use that measurement, compare it to the manufacturer’s specification, and determine if the charge is correct. I believe if you made a list of all the most important things students should learn to do before they leave you would find the most important skills involve understanding relationships. I don’t know of a sure fire way to teach relationships. I think that people who have a good mechanical aptitude readily see relationships. Students that have difficulty understanding relationships need explicit instructions and lots of practice. Teaching something that is “obvious” to you can be difficult because you have to deconstruct your thinking process so you can explain how you accomplish a task that you do innately. For example, suppose you had to teach someone how to use a screwdriver. Do you know exactly how you hold it? How do you get the screw started? What do you do after turning your wrist a quarter turn so that you can turn the screw some more? I have actually had to teach people how to use a screwdriver and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever taught because I really did not know how to explain it. Admittedly, the screwdriver example is extreme. However, the same type of deconstruction process can be used to explain more analytical processes like measuring superheat. My prescription for helping relationship challenged students is to:

Analyze the task in detail – leave nothing out and assume nothing.

Teach the students the process in explicit detail making sure they understand each step.

Practice, practice, practice!

Patience, patience, patience!

Remember, if all the students could do everything easily on their own they wouldn’t need you.

Are You Practicing for Success or Failure?

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." – Aristotle

I would like to propose a slight revision to Aristotle’s line of thought: Success is not a condition, but a habit. Have you ever known someone that is lucky and seems to go from one success to another? It is sometimes difficult not to be envious of their success and wish we were so lucky. If the primary action you take towards becoming successful is to wish for success, chances are you will not find it. People are not successful because they are lucky; they are successful because they prepare for their success through repetitive practice. So the question is: “Are you practicing for success or failure?” You might ask “Who would practice for failure?” However, I have seen many students diligently practicing for their inevitable failure. They practice for failure by not preparing for class, arriving late, and making endlessly creative excuses for their failure to succeed. Eventually they become expert at failing – eliminating all chances of success. I will not tell you that if you work hard and put your best effort into everything you do that you will always be successful. But I can guarantee that if you do not work at being successful, you will fail. So you can take the sure thing – guaranteed failure, or you can put yourself out there and risk being successful.

The Strength Remains

Nine years ago, I was working in my office at school when a teacher from down the hall came in and said that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers. While I was searching for information about the first plane, the second plane hit the other tower. It was only then that I realized we were under attack. I believe the trade center towers were chosen because they became an icon of American strength. Rather than weaken us, the attacks strengthened us in many ways. We proved our mettle immediately following the tragedy. Stories abound about how people rose to the challenge: from police and firemen risking their lives to politicians speaking with one voice as Americans. My favorite story involves St.Paul’s Chapel directly across the street. Somehow St. Paul's survived the shower of debris and was transformed into a round the clock hostel, providing care and support for eight months to the rescue and recovery workers. Volunteers came from all over America to work there. So many volunteers came that they had to be scheduled and their time helping was limited to allow everyone a chance to experience the blessing of helping. People cried when their time was up and they had to leave.

The towers came down. The strength remains.

Are You Giving Your Students Cognitive Indigestion?

One cold wintry Friday, the philosophy professor at a small college looked out at his class only to see a single student. The snow was deep, the wind was blowing, and the rest of the class just was not able to make the long, cold trek to school. Undaunted, the professor launched into the full text of the lecture he had prepared. He was determined to reward the student for his faithfulness and deliver his best lecture ever. He elaborated on each point. He quoted from multiple sources, contrasting their different approaches to the core argument. He gave stirring testimony about the marvelous accomplishments of visionaries who had followed the tenets of the philosophy he espoused. And finally, he concluded with a call to his audience, exhorting him to embrace the difficult but rewarding path he had just laid out. After speaking passionately for two hours straight, the professor was so excited he could not wait to ask the student his impression of the lecture. The student was quiet for a long time before he spoke. “Professor, I have to feed the cattle at my folks this afternoon. If there is only one steer in the barn, I’m not going to make him eat the whole bale of hay.”

I have sometimes been guilty of trying to feed my students the whole bale at once, trying to include every excruciating detail about a topic before they have gained a broad understanding. Information overload can cause cognitive indigestion. This occurs when the listener has a large amount of data without any real framework to organize and understand it. Most people tend to learn in stages, unfolding a little bit of the mystery at a time. The study of electricity is like this. We start with general description and then add ohm’s law to refine the idea. Then after the students have the hang of standard ohm’s law formulas, we add series and parallel calculations. After students can handle these we tell them that ohm’s law is not valid for most air conditioning work because of inductive and capacitive reactance. If you are really sadistic, you will then trot out the LCR calculations. There is method in our madness. If we were to drop all this on the students in the first week, most would become confused and frustrated. It is OK to leave out details and fill them in as the students gain subject maturity. In fact, for most folks it is preferable. It is far better to feel that you are making progress, than to feel that you are drowning in information. One of the ways that I know when a student is really “getting it” is when they comment that they are beginning to understand how much they don’t know. Typically, these are some of the brightest students – they are gaining enough insight to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. It is all right to try to teach your students everything you know. In fact, your goal should be for your students to learn more than you know. It just will not happen overnight. If you guide them well, it will happen and they will return to share their knowledge and success with you. There is nothing more rewarding.

Service IS What We Sell

HVAC/R service technicians must master many different skills to be successful. There are the hard skills that involve manipulation and mechanical ability like electrical wiring, brazing, and refrigerant handling; there are the problem solving skills like refrigeration and electrical troubleshooting; and there are soft skills such as customer service. Service technicians must be competent in every one of these skillsets. Note that these skillsets are quite different from each other. The hard skills require mechanical ability and a good kinesthetic sense. Problem solving requires abstract thinking and the ability to take several pieces of information and form a reasonable judgment. Even if a service technician has great mechanical ability and is an accomplished problem solver, they must be able to deal with customers. Service work is primarily about customer service. Often, individuals who are mechanically gifted are not “people persons.” They would much rather rebuild a compressor than talk to the compressor’s owner. The problem is that the compressor is not who writes the checks, the owner is. So if you want to be paid, you need to learn to talk to the customers.

Increasingly, service technicians are required to make out a bill and collect payment. I consider this yet another skill set – financial. In the good old days, I would simply tell the customer that they would receive a bill. When they wanted to know how much it would be I honestly did not have a clue. I might as well have told them to write a check and leave the amount blank so I could fill it in for their convenience later on. Customers now expect to know what they owe before the technician leaves. In many cases, the company expects the technician to collect payment. To create bills and collect payment technicians must be familiar with the company’s pricing policies. Many companies use price books which list prices for specific services. The price includes all aspects of the cost - parts, labor, overhead, and profit . Technicians bill customers according to the services they deliver. The technician needs to learn how the book is organized and be comfortable looking up prices in the book. Many technicians are uncomfortable using the books, making bills, and collecting payment. Often, companies just hand the new technician the book without much training. Although every company’s price book and billing procedure are unique, most companies now require their service technicians to produce bills and collect payment.

I think every HVAC/R program should have some example pricing procedures available to their students. The point is not to tell them what to charge, but to help them prepare to make bills using pricing policies that are prevalent in your area. A vendor for a price book that is used by several contractors in our area supplied us with a sample book. The prices do not reflect any particular company and all services are not in the book. Further, SAMPLE is written prominently across every page. But this book lets us inject a dose of reality into troubleshooting. Students should not only be able to track down the cause of the problem, they should also be able to find the service required to repair the system in the price book.

One thing that many students have a hard time with is the large price discrepancy between the cost of the part being replaced and the cost of providing the service. I emphasize that the customer pays far more for the technician’s expertise and service than they do for the part. The cost of the part is almost negligible. I point out that this is true for nearly any service business. Otherwise, the company cannot make money and their technicians cannot earn a good living. They are not cheating the customer by charging a high price. They are cheating the customer if they fail to deliver complete and competent service. We are called service technicians for a reason.

Making the Connection with Schematic Diagrams

Many of topics that our students struggle with the most have some level of abstraction. Reading a schematic diagram is near the top of the list. A schematic diagram is a symbolic representation of an abstraction – circuit logic. Mentally tying this symbolic representation to the physical components and wires can be a struggle for some students. This is especially true for devices like contactors and relays that are represented by multiple symbols because they have parts with different functions located in different circuits. Recently I have tried having students draw a schematic diagram of a basic packaged air conditioning system. Then I give them a pictorial diagram with drawings of components and ask them to “wire up” their schematic. Most students have a few difficulties drawing the schematic, but they usually make it past this part without too many scuff marks. The trouble comes when they have to translate the schematic diagram that they drew into “wires” on the pictorial diagram. I believe this is because students can essentially copy circuits they see in the book without understanding the details. However, details are important. Several years ago, we would put all our electrical theory up front. Students did not do any wiring until after covering all the theory. However, I noticed that many students who could draw a basic heat pump schematic diagram could not wire a toggle switch and a light. This caused me to wonder how much they really understood. Having students “wire” units on paper by drawing lines between pictures or drawings of components allows them to work out the connection between the abstract and the physical without burning up all your transformers. I am not suggesting that drawing lines to represent wires replaces wiring actual components, but it will quickly show you who has a clue and who doesn’t. You need to work some more with the folks who can’t differentiate between low voltage and line voltage circuits, or the people who want to put L1 on one side of a spst switch and L2 on the other side of the same switch. The pictorial diagrams with all the wires drawn in can look a bit messy and hard to follow. Using color coded markers helps. Better yet, use colored pencils that can be erased. Use two colors for line voltage and two more for low voltage. Have them draw in large dots where two wires are supposed to connect and little humps where two wires cross that are not supposed to connect. It does not take students long to figure out that neatness is its own reward. Loopy, hastily scribbled lines make for difficult circuit tracing and lead to confusion. I usually have a big stack of pages with the components that need to be “wired up.”

Your Job is NOT to Answer E-mail

My job would be so much easier without the constant interruption from these students! It can be easy to lose your focus in the hustle and bustle of running an HVAC/R program. With the demands of documenting things like student learning outcomes, justifying the need for an expendables budget for items like copper, advising students, scheduling classes, attending faculty meetings, and answering e-mail, it sometimes seems like taking care of administrative details is your primary job. There can be a bit of a let-down when the fury momentarily subsides and there are no URGENT e-mails to answer. "Oh there are no e-mails, what do I do?” Then a student comes in, asks a question and I remember why I am there in the first place. It is important that we remember to save enough time and energy to focus on the students. All the other things are just supporting roles, not the main job. One way to keep the administrative part of teaching from completely taking over your time is to set aside a specific time for accomplishing administrative duties. One day a week I do not lecture or teach in the lab, I administer. That way I am not stealing time from the students, trying to complete reports five minutes at a time in between working with students. When you are juggling administrative functions and students at the same time it may feel like you are being productive because you are so busy, but an honest assessment of what you have accomplished afterwards can be deflating. I personally find that trying to juggle students and administrative details at the same time leads to lack of focus and poor performance on both tasks. That is not to say I don’t answer any e-mails until Friday, it just means that I know I have time to accomplish time consuming tasks on Friday. Another trick is to automate administrative tasks whenever possible. I confess that for many years I really could not understand why many of my friends liked using test banks to write quizzes and tests. I was a purist – writing all my tests from scratch so no two tests were ever the same. I would often save them in Word format, and use old tests as templates, but that was the extent of my automation. Then I became involved in writing Fundamentals of HVAC/R and everything that goes with it, including writing a bank of test questions for use with TestGen. It did not take long for me to see the advantage of using an organized test bank. I can write a good test in about five minutes by just selecting questions from the test bank. I can still write all the new questions I want, but saving them in the test-bank format means that I can retrieve them easily later on. With all the Word documents, I end up searching through lots of electronic documents looking for that gas furnace test I wrote last year. Finally, you should learn to use your tools. You expect your students to learn how to use gauges and electric meters. They have to become proficient in their use to do the job they are training to do. Similarly, all instructors should be proficient with office productivity applications like Word and Excel. If Microsoft is not your cup of tea, substitute whatever word processor and spreadsheet program you like, but mastering the word processor and spreadsheet will make your life much easier. I would certainly not try to pass myself off as an expert in either, but I do use both Word and Excel on a daily basis. Since I use them every day, learning to use them well saves me time. This requires an up-front investment of time, but it pays off almost every day.