Re: kVA Effects on Discovery Channel

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: Christoph Bohr <cb-at-luebke-lands.de> 

Hello Folks.

I did not have the chance to see the show, but the discussion about the way
these shows are made just reminded me of a diskussion I lead some time ago
with a elementary school teacher.

This teacher just said the same thing about simplification as some of you did
and that it is unimportant if the information is partitially wrong as the
pupils will learn about these facts later by semselves and replace wrong info
by the right one... From my own experience I think this is ( mostly ) wrong.
Some personal experiences:

1st:
When I was around 5 or 6 I started working with electronics ( very simple
things of course ) and as I had no one else, I had to ask my teacher when I
had some questions. She was alway very willing to explain something but today
I know much of the informations was wrong and simplified just in the way you
see on these TV-Shows. I ended up wasting a lot of time wondering why things
did not work out as explained....Of course learning this way can be good,
too, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel... The same thing was with
some TV-Shows we have here, compareable to discovery channel. Maybe I should
have asked someone else.... ;-)

2nd:
If you don't know jack about electricity, you probably can not differentiate
e.g the words "current" and "voltage", they are just "those slectricity
things"....
Mixing these terms up like h*** does not simplify anything IMO

3rd:
I have been teaching 4th grade students ( max 10 years old ) for about 5 years
now in computer course in my freetime. And I learned that you can explain the
most 10 year old's much more that you may think if eyplained properly, even
without getting them bored. They are just young and know less...but they are
not stupid.

After all, the basics are a hundred years old and with a little help almost
everyone will savvy most of this stuff, assumed he is really interested in
learning something. If you just want a show with some action for
entertainment, go ahead but leave the tech stuff completely out.....wrong
audience. There is nothing wrong with either kind of show, they are just two
different things.

think I got steamed about that enough for now...;-) There was definitely no
offense intended towards anyone, I just had to say it.

Sincerely

Christoph Bohr