At the next session the kids were excited but leery – aren’t we ever going to make that train go?

There was a list of operating roles on the blackboard. My classroom has three beautiful gray slate blackboards along one wall. They are unusual today, and the kids are fascinated with the whole idea of writing and drawing with chalk, though they also find the experience a little bit “edgy” and uncomfortable because of the squeaks when they push the chalk instead of pull it.

Switchperson (two required)

Flagperson

Brakeperson

Engineer

Conductor

Fireperson

These odd gender-neutral terms didn’t fit the era of the steam engine hissing on the layout, but neither do a couple of the cars I picked for the Inglenook. I would save the whole concept of period fidelity for another day.

As I walked to the board I asked, “Who wants to volunteer for which roles?”

Pandemonium. But the loudest were complaining that I hadn’t described what each of them does yet. “Sometimes that happens when you’re asked to volunteer.”

Most of the kids understood that the engineer had something to do with the throttle and there was plenty of interest in that, and some of them had a vague idea about the conductor “punching tickets or something.” I went down the list and picked from among raised hands for each role, being judiciously random except for a bit of silent selectivity when it came to the conductor. One of the most difficult but important roles of a teacher is to manage the flow of tasks so that most of the time individual kids are grappling with challenges that have enough challenge to be engaging but not so much as to be overwhelming, for them.  For the first experience it would help if the conductor had well developed social skills.

Once there were names next to each role I led them through some things they all needed to know in order to use the Inglenook. First, couplers. I had everyone stand up in facing pairs, holding their right elbows to their sides and extending loosely curled fingers, thumb up, at a right angle to their bellies.

“Now couple with each other.”

Middle school kids are hugely entertained when adults deliver deadpan lines like that. But once they settled down and connected what they were doing with the tiny things sticking out of the cars on the layout, they were abuzz with what a clever idea it was.

I had given considerable thought to what kind of coupler strategy would work best for a middle school Inglenook layout, and decided to ignore the magnetic feature. I experimented with a Rix magnetic wand but found that it required just about as much dexterity as a wooden skewer, maybe more in some situations, and the slight deviation from prototype behavior that ramp usage entails made me decide to just use round wooden toothpicks.

Before I let the kids practice using toothpicks to uncouple cars I had to discuss The Hand of God. Out of scale objects like the human hand should never enter the miniature world that we were modeling. The separation was instantly clear to the kids, and they really appreciated the compromise that reaching in with a toothpick to uncouple represents. One student said, “we should call the role of the person doing the uncoupling “Logger.” I couldn’t understand the reference until the student explained that the toothpicks were like giant scale logs. They were getting into it!

To be continued…

Jeff