A Peanut Butter and Jelly Jam

Fish in the can saws wild apples dog car sidewalk tree. Shirt the table carpet in the floor roof cloud. What? What do you mean I’m not making sense? I’m using simple English words. Oh, I see. I must not be communicating.

Believe it or not, communication is not as easy as it seems. In this lesson, I’m hoping to show you that hearing what someone is saying, and saying what you want someone to hear is quite a skill. A good skill for life and a vital skill for science.

In science, the ability to tell someone what you did, how you did it, and what happened after you did it, is a key skill in sharing science information. Scientists from around the world share information and their measurements and details of what they did must be very precise. To begin with, let’s try this little exercise in giving directions.

You need:

• Peanut Butter
• Jelly
• Bread
• Butter Knife

(Be prepared to make a mess and have fun.)

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1.      Pick a person to be the sandwich maker (this works better if it’s someone who’s kind of in on the game).

2.      The sandwich maker tells the group that he or she is a robot who does everything that it is told. However, the robot is very literal, so it does EXACTLY what it is told to do.

3.      The rest of the group gives one instruction at a time (“Put the jam on the bread.”) until the sandwich is made or until no one can stand laughing anymore.

The key to this activity is the sandwich maker. The robot must do exactly what he or she is told. So when the robot is told to put the jam on the bread, the robot takes the jar of jam and puts it on the bag that the loaf of bread is in! When the robot is told to take the bread out of the bag, the robot can’t do it because the bread bag isn’t open! Have a lot of fun with this, it’s messy and makes a great point.

It’s a little harder to tell someone how to make a sandwich than you thought right?! Try telling a robot how to tie its shoes. Or for that matter, walk across the room. It’s quite hard. Communication involves a lot of assumptions.

An assumption is when you expect someone to know what you’re talking about. You assumed that when you told your “robot” to put the jam on the bread, that the robot would know that it needed to open the jar. Then you might have told the robot to open the jar and it didn’t know how to do that either! Again, you assumed something that is obvious to you but not at all obvious, perhaps, to something or somebody else.

My father tells the story of when he learned this lesson the hard way. When he was a kid there was a hole under the porch at his house. His Mom noticed a board sitting on the ground and told my Dad to fill the hole with the wood. Well, my father, being a good little boy, did exactly as he was told and put the wood as far into the hole as he could, leaving a good two feet of board sticking out of the hole. His mother came back from what she was doing, took one look at the wood sticking out of the hole and proceeded to yell at my father for being such a dummy. My father was clueless. As far as he could tell, he did exactly what he was asked to do. However, his mother assumed that when she said fill the hole with the wood, he would use the wood to push dirt into the hole. My father followed the directions correctly but was wrong. His mom gave directions correctly and was also wrong.

As you can see, communication can be very difficult. I’m willing to bet this kind of thing has happened to you. You have told someone to do something and they messed it up or someone told you to do something and you messed it up. Keep this in mind the next time something gets messed up. A little better communication can keep a lot of things from getting messed up (and keep you out of trouble as well).

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