Volume 25 · Number 1 · Fall 2007
Aggies Remember
The Inspiration of Garbage
Motorcycles, motors and some real-life lessons.
“Save often.” I bellowed these words to my students over the clatter of keyboards and the cacophony of voices asking me in so many different ways, “Why did the damn computer do that?” Carlos, a frustrated student who had just lost his term paper again (after working for three hours without saving the file), wanted to know why he had to take my class anyway. I needed a way to reel him back in. I was losing Carlos.
As I wandered the computer lab putting out the occasional fire (bytes burn, you know) my mind slipped back past my early efforts teaching MS-DOS and Pascal, to my own days on the receiving end in the classroom.
In 1972 I arrived at UC Davis with an abiding love of physics and of riding motorcycles with my friends by Putah Creek. Oddly enough, I found that I would have the opportunity to combine the two passions. One of my favorite classes came not from within my physics major but from a less likely source: the agricultural engineering department. If memory serves, the class was saddled with the unwieldy name of “Engines for Automotive, Agricultural, Residential and Recreational Use.” And lessons learned keeping my balky Spanish motocross bike running were well applied to solving classroom problems. I remember feeling quite smug during a practical exam as my group of students was able to get our crippled engine repaired and fired up in half the time of any other team.
If only I could have been as successful with the Montessa motorcycle that I rode during the hours I should have been puzzling over quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, I spent much of my riding time with hands buried in the Montessa’s motor while so-called friends threw dirt in my face from their more reliable, but much slower bikes.
As an aside, whatever skills I had as a mechanic both threatened and, in the end, saved my occupancy of a third-floor apartment just off campus. My roommate, Don, and I would work on our motorcycles in our apartment — hardly appropriate behavior in the eyes of most apartment managers. Somehow ours — a man named Jim — found out about the wrenching going on in our apartment. Apparently hauling motorcycles up and down staircases cannot be done with any subtlety. But, as luck would have it, Jim also rode a motorcycle. And since it was in need of some repairs, we dug in, tore the bike apart and got everything back in working order. As Jim took off on a test ride, happy grin stretched across his face, I knew he would be inclined to overlook our apartment abuse.
Even better than my foray into ag engineering was an applied electronics class in the physics realm. In this electronics class we had a free-for-all of a term project, and I chose to tie electronics to motorcycles in a practical way.
A bit more power from a motorcycle is always useful, and for my project I designed a circuit that would slightly alter the motor’s timing at the rider’s control to coax a bit more oomph out of the machine. I needed a test bed to demonstrate the circuit in the lab without bringing in the entire extremely loud and smelly Montessa. I confess to a bit of trepidation when I demonstrated, quite successfully, the end product. You see, my test bed was a discarded garbage disposal I had rescued from my apartment’s Dumpster. It had that scary under-the-sink corrosion and goo patina that you really don’t want to touch. In the end, with the ignition pieces grafted on, the garbage disposal motor worked perfectly to simulate the engine of my motorcycle. With a crooked smile and plenty of positive comment regarding my creativity, my instructor deposited a fine grade on my project.
How lucky I was to have a teacher who encouraged the strange and unusual in his lab, something I now try to foster in my own classrooms. Somewhere in the back of my classroom, a student like Carlos who had been nodding off will snap to when I can relate a lesson to his interests. And I’ll have him hooked — all because I enjoy bringing odd examples into my classroom, just as my instructor took delight in allowing a garbage disposal into his physics lab 35 years ago.
Larry Fogg ‘74 lives in Bend, Ore. He has retired from teaching at Central Oregon Community College and now acts as a computer consultant, part-time editor and full-time wanderer in the wilds of Oregon.