My parents suffered from my relentless attempts to take something apart and see how it works. For many years, it stopped there, because I didn’t focus on the individuals tasks I was performing. I was more interested in the final product of ‘the pile of pieces.’ This lead to many broken or disassembled items that would never be put back together without an engineering degree and/or the original manufacturing plant the item came from.

Today I took apart a couple of DLP projectors and was able to recover the working pieces to make one working projector from two broken ones. What’s my point in all this? The thought process, critical thinking, and the ability to reconstruct pieces into the whole. These skills can not be taught through traditional classroom approaches of the teacher as the Sage on the Stage. We must remember that in order to promote critical thinking and problem solving, meaningful tasks must becom a part of instruction and classroom participation. Although my journey of a million pieces has brought me to a point that I can (usually) dismantle electronic devices and pit them back together – often gaining a better understanding of how things work.