The Professorial Quotebook: Dr. Stahl
Not every professor is as cool as Dr. Stahl. Sure, some professors at Geneva College try to be cool by using slang that went out of style three years ago, but Dr. Stahl doesn’t need to resort to anti-cool tactics to get his students to like him.
He just blows things up.
Before our chemistry unit in our general science class last semester, he said the best words bored students could hear: “I promise you in every class we will burn or explode something.” From then on, we arrived with cameras primed for action. And we were not disappointed.
Dr. Stahl filled balloons with hydrogen gas (extremely flammable) and lit them on fire. He created a fire tornado inside a trash can. He sent jets of fire shooting out of 10-gallons jugs.
Not all of his experiments involved fire, however. During our electricity unit, he brought in a Van de Graaff generator, which is a large metal ball on a pole, charged with static electricity to make your hair stand up when you touched it. It also had a metal wand attached that you could hold near it and see lightning arching in between.
The metal ball was not cooperating that day. Try as he might, Dr. Stahl could not get sparks to fly. His hair wasn’t standing on end, either, so he turned up the electrical input as high as it would go, and put his hand on the ball.
Nothing happened.
Disappointed, Dr. Stahl put the wand down on the table next to the silent ball and walked over to the wall to unplug it. As soon as his back was turned, a single arc of lightning leapt from the ball to the wand.
Instantly, the camera mounted to the ceiling, which we had been using to livestream the lecture to the students on Zoom, shut off. Dr. Stahl’s computer, nearby on a desk, flashed an error code which was projected onto the screen in front of us, replacing the faces of quarantined students who were now cut off from the class.
We certainly weren’t bored now, and a low murmur of excitement ran through the room as Dr. Stahl looked at us with suspicion. “What’s so funny?” he asked, and we all pointed at the screen with its multi-colored bars and half-legible error code, still chuckling in awe.
“What — ?” Dr. Stahl stared at the board, at his computer, at the camera, and finally at us. “I killed the camera? That’s so cool!”
More laughter from the students, who loved having a professor who gets excited when his experiments destroy equipment. (In case you’re worried, let me assure you that the camera and computer both survived the incident.)
Later that class, resuming his lecture, we meandered over to the topic of light bulbs and Watts, the unit electrical power is measured in, whose equation was deduced by James Watt. Imagine, Dr. Stahl was saying, having your name on every lightbulb in this room.
He looked at us and held out a lightbulb, which has the number of Watts it carries printed on the top. “Have you autographed any lightbulbs recently?” he asked us. No, Dr. Stahl, I have not invented any units of power recently. Sorry to disappoint.
We talked about all kinds of energy in Dr. Stahl’s class: electrical (how the camera died), chemical (where the fire comes from), and potential, where gravity gets to do its thing. These experiments involved large weights, trampolines, and, unfortunately, feet.
Dr. Stahl was most emphatic about getting us to memorize the acceleration due to gravity, which is a simple 9.8 meters per second squared. He asked us every class, and we would always chant the same answer back to him. One day, a student questioned why in the world we would ever need to know that number after the class ended. After all, biblical studies majors don’t often calculate the speed of a falling watermelon.
Dr. Stahl didn’t need any time to think of an applicable reason: “If your roommate wakes you up in the middle of the night shining a flashlight in your face asking you the acceleration due to gravity, you should be able to say, ‘9.8, let me go!’”
I’m temped to try this on my roommate, who is currently taking this class. See if she knows her stuff. I don’t think she would accept that Dr. Stahl put me up to it, though.
In reality, Dr. Stahl isn’t always this destructive. These are just the moments I’ve managed to capture in my quotebook. Most of the things he says are informative and engaging, and sometimes even cool and funny.
Which is impressive for someone who was teaching at Geneva when my father graduated 33 years ago.
