ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the parallels between the forces that educators and students face and the forces that engineers and architects must take into account when they design roofs and bridges. It provides some of the pressures students and teachers experience. The chapter reviews how the designers of structures transfer those forces to the ground. It argues that educators can find ways—parallel to those developed by the designers of physical structures—to transfer classroom forces to the educational ground. Some educators respond to classroom forces with the metaphorical equivalent of bolstering material strength, of adding to the thickness of the beam or the volume of the cement. Teacher films illustrate another inadequate response to classroom forces, one unrelated to the comedic chops of a famous funny-man. Classroom forces are real and substantial, and they naturally need to reach the ground, so teachers need to design structures that simplify and shorten the path for those forces to follow.
