Descriptor Disaster

I have a new job teaching. I get to interact with students and help them learn new topics and ways of thinking. I love it.

Yesterday in class, I held a small discussion on how to design alarm clocks. I was trying to help the students learn how to identify the difference between requirements (what results are needed) and specifications (particular approaches to gain the results).

As part of this discussion, we talked about how the alarm clock needs to wake a person up. This is a requirement. A buzzer, on the other hand, is a specification. Other ways of waking a user up might include a radio, blinking lights, MP3 player, or throwing water on someone.

In the process of generating ideas about potential approaches to waking people up, a student piped up “it could shake the bed.” Great idea! Not wanting to spend much time writing so we could continue to discuss options, I turned around at the whiteboard and wrote a succinct summary:

VIBRATOR

The entire class started chuckling … and then erupted in laughter.

I could feel myself turning red, and because I did not want to encourage the laughter, I continued to face the board. After shaking my head a bit, I decided to change what I had written to “shake bed.” But, that just made matters worse.  I could tell that every time a student looked at the “shake bed” requirement, what he saw was “VIBRATOR.” Hence the random eruptions in giggles and guffaws for the remainder of the class.

And the moral of the story is . . . just because I can find a one-word descriptor for something doesn’t necessarily mean I should use it.