00:00 Tasha

Welcome to Diary of a Dreamer, where resilience unlocks your potential. I’m Tasha Eizinger, and each week I’ll bring you powerful stories and practical insights from my own experiences and inspiring guests. Whether you’re facing challenges or chasing dreams, this podcast is your go-to for motivation, building confidence, and practical tips for transforming obstacles into opportunities. Be sure to check out my website, TashaEizinger.com.

00:28 Tasha

Let’s dive into today’s episode and start turning your dreams into reality. I’m going to have to look at my notes to introduce you because you have quite the intro here, Marsha. And just a side note before we get started, I am not a homeschooling person either. Okay. And so have you been to the Midwest Expo? No, Jean reached out. She ran across my books and invited me to be a speaker.

00:57 Marsha

And I thought, wow, what a perfect opportunity to engage with really a core part of the audience. I’m really trying to reach through my middle grade STEM adventure books and my experiments. So I figured that’s really the perfect balance for parents and teachers, grandparents who are looking to get their kids engaged in STEM. Story changes attitudes and the experiments are learning by doing.

01:26 

The other piece from my personal experience is just the power of choice and hobbies. And so some of my background, I’m an engineer with bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Purdue. Then I joined GE Aviation in 1981, did a master’s of science in aerospace engineering through their advanced course in engineering.

01:51 

did that in 84 and then i had a three-year assignment as manager technical education programs from 1990 to 1993 managing ge’s advanced courses in engineering and i worked with markle and fowler from uc’s teachers college learned what i wish i had known when i was going to school about effective teaching methods

02:12 

rediscovered the joy of learning, went back to mainstream engineering, and did a PhD in materials engineering while working full-time at GE. So I have all this different experience, but the one point I want to share is sophomore year at Purdue, physics courses are generally fun cap courses. I got my first D ever. Oh, how did you handle that? It’s like I went home at Christmas break. It’s like, shit, can I do?

02:40 

engineering. Am I cut out for this? And my parents were not happy. They weren’t going to send me back to Purdue unless I got things turned around. And the thing that really that I reached back that was my rock was all the creative stuff I’d done as a kid in grade school, middle grade, all my hobbies, sewing, designing furniture with my dad, painting, all those things.

03:08 

i was used to dreaming up projects figuring out how to execute them on my own i didn’t have a teacher telling me here we have an hour to complete this project turn it in you know it was all those hobbies where i learned project management industrial engineering for workspace setup you know where do i put my sewing machine i use the ripper and the scissors

03:32 

often the screwdriver to change needles you know what’s effective workspace and layout you get used to also your pattern layout how how to start from start to finish and you fail you don’t you don’t learn to sew without ripping and you come up with less than perfect creations and you learn to accept them and love them and do better the next time so through all of those hobbies at the time i was thinking okay i’m a creative person

04:01

this is an engineering is just another medium with what i know now i would say i learned problem solving skills through my hobbies and i learned to succeed and fail because the motivation was built in i didn’t quit It was fun. So I kept going. I just figured out a better way. And some of the engineers and I, GE, we kind of laughed because GE had this habit of coming up with another quality initiative, bring quality to life, continuous improvement. You know, like they were going to teach us engineers how to continuously improve processes. You know, we learned that through our hobbies. And so, yeah, they bring, you know, Six Sigma brought a lot of statistical tools that we didn’t have.

04:47

But what I learned was, man, that creative stuff that I did as a kid in middle grade, before I got heavily scheduled and had all these extracurricular activities, I had, you know, my mom was a stay-at-home mom. You know, I grew up in the 60s. You know, I had the luxury of, you know, she led the Girl Scout troop, so she planned activities for Girl Scouts. So we had a lot of creative activities there. You know, we did things as a family. We collected butterflies. Dad was very creative. He was a non-degreed industrial engineer. He was a veteran of World War II.

05:28

um he could have gone to college on the gi bill but he lacked confidence in his math skills um and so my mom saw this as man my husband could be earning a lot more money than he is now he could be advancing further in his career he doesn’t have a college degree he didn’t have confidence because his high school dropped him from math courses and you know he got extra english courses which served him well but he lacked that confidence in math

05:56

And what I’ve learned through my volunteer activities with the Greater Cincinnati STEM Collaborative is that’s common today. Lack of confidence in math skills is the number one barrier to success in STEM. And my mom looked at my dad and said, my daughters are, they’re going to take math seriously. It’s important. At one point.

06:22

Whether you like it or not, you use it every day. Even if you have a calculator, I used to teach my students that even when you use a calculator, you have to know if the calculator’s right or wrong, and you have to know which numbers to input and how to input them. And you need to not be afraid of math. I mean, the attitude is so important. It’s like, and the thing that I found is like, teachers don’t really understand what engineers do. Okay, let’s backtrack.

06:49

He knew it because there might be listeners. So I grew up with an older brother who he was always taking things apart to see how they worked. He’s a mechanical engineer. He’s brilliant at what he does. So I’ve seen it from the inside growing up with that and how he I mean, he can figure out pretty much anything.

07:12 Tasha

I mean, he really can’t. It’s just how his brain works. He sees a structure. He’s like, well, this is how I would do it. And I’m like, how do you know? And it’s just amazing. So can you explain to everybody who hasn’t had that sneak peek of an engineer’s mind, what do engineers do? In the very basic of terms, engineers solve problems. And they go to school to learn the physics and the science behind the type of problems.

07:41 Marsha

that they are going to solve. For example, a chemical engineer has to understand what chemicals they put together and what products are going to come out and how to safely combine that to make something new. A mechanical engineer is mechanical engineering so broad. I ended up focusing more on structural engineering. So like in the structures, you might need to know, OK, how much stress can this engine component

08:11

withstand before braking? What are its failure modes? When is it going to fail? What are the consequences of failure? And from an aircraft engine perspective, we’re really interested in this because a critical rotating part, if it fails, could exit the engine, be an uncontained failure, could enter the fuselage of the aircraft. It could cause loss of aircraft, loss of life. Right. So there are methods for designing

08:41

that use well you can use the old-fashioned method which was you just test the old-fashioned before we had computers that sounds like it takes forever you would test something and you try to figure out what works and why and then you have people like newton who figured out gravity and figured out the formula for that it’s like okay now i have a formula i can predict it using math so in many engineers not all

09:08

We’ll use computer models or math models to predict how something’s going to work. Is it kind of like running simulations then? It can be, but I think of a simulation as being one specific condition. Okay. And like for engine components, we would build finite element models of all the engine structures and the blades.

09:36

You know, the people who did the detailed analysis, they’d figure out how to put the loads on it, how to spin it up. We’d have mission analysis engineers who would figure out what’s the plane going to do. It’s going to take off. How long is it going to take to take off? How long is it going to take to climb? How long is it going to be at cruise? And it would have to figure in the temperature, ambient temperature mixes of all the airports around the world, the pressures and temperatures, all the things in the engine cycle that affect the pressure and temperature speeds.

10:09

of the engine what it’s encompassing and then the finite element people map all that onto the finite element models and then the life engineers we marry that with the materials engineering data so we get a stress and life a stress and temperature history for critical locations and we put that into a life curve and figure out you know how much life is being consumed okay i have to backtrack here for a second

0:37 Tasha

You are doing a great job explaining very complicated things. Let us over the board. So I also have a Purdue education, an elementary education, not in anything engineering. So the fact that you can explain it, this tells me a lot about you as a writer and probably why you’re an award-winning author and why you have these programs for kids.

11:04 Marsha

yeah because you can take these very complex things and simplify it so anybody can understand right so a simple simple explanation i can show you okay here’s a ruler yeah okay engineers we can develop formulas for all kinds of things how much this ruler is going to deflect based on the dimensions in the cross section of this ruler okay okay but if i stand it on flat like a diving board

11:34

There’s a lot of deflection here. If I put it on its side like an I-beam, it’s very stiff. Yeah. So that’s something you can do at home with a plastic ruler, a plastic knife to understand here’s the power of math and algebra that can predict based on the geometry. of any object and material properties and you don’t even have to know the material properties to know i turn on the side it’s going to deflect more i turn on its and it’s going to deflect less you can see that from a formula and that one is in book two i love that because when i was at purdue and you know purdue’s very science heavy even in elementary education there were so many cool experiments and things that you can do to make it these formulas and things that seem

12:19

out there and hard to understand very understandable because it’s tactile it’s something that you can play with and learn by doing instead of just reading it so you’ve incorporated books which i’m excited to hear about your books too i’m also an author of children’s picture books and yeah we i can’t wait to meet you at the west home school

12:44

expo in indianapolis on june 28th yes me and tasha there yes we would love to meet you and i can’t wait to meet you Marsha because i think a lot of what we’re doing really goes together well and it’s all about building the foundation in kids you build a strong foundation you have a stronger future and that’s what i’m hearing you do

13:07

And the other piece that I’ve learned, so I’ve done a lot of reading in a variety of fields, but one of the books I’ve read is the 10,000 hour rule, or talent is overrated by Jeff Colvin. And he talks about the 10,000 hour rule, like Mozart and Tiger Woods, many consider them geniuses, but were they really, or did they just start at a younger age and they had expert?

13:32

tutoring in a very specific discipline by their father so that by the time, you know, their peers were starting in music or golf, you know, they had years of deliberate practice on them. So they were just that far up on the learning curve. And what I’ve concluded from my own life experience is all that stuff I did as a kid, my creative hobbies, I was learning creative problem solving skills.

13:58

And that is the most transferable of all content taught in school. The other main things are facts, concepts, and generalizations, which are very specific to a particular discipline. So the facts for vertebrates versus invertebrates, you know, that’s going to look a lot different than the facts for buoyancy or, you know, density of water. So I feel like I had a lot of time doing creative problem solving.

14:27

and it didn’t have to be in mechanical engineering it could be in sewing it could be in painting you know when you’re doing arts you’re also releasing this creative side of your brain and you’re not afraid of failing which is another key thing that doing this through play and hobbies empowers kids because they don’t have a parent judging their art

14:48

homework almost everybody’s going to say yeah that’s that’s good and as a budding artist i’m thinking like okay i’m trying to communicate something and i have to figure out how to mix my watercolors or and i have to figure out when to stop so part or if i’m doing clay it’s like how do i get the texture i want or how do i check different glazes okay budding engineer i actually did a high school i took art in high school um because i

15:17

I was between art and engineering. Those were my career choices. And you’re a creative and a scientist, which also goes hand in hand. It does. And I think women are more likely to really embrace both sides. I think my experience is guys tend to get really tunnel focused and deep and they, anyhow, but that’s my opinion. I have no data to back it up. You’re allowed to have opinions here.

15:45

It’s fine. I found there was one time I was like, I was trying to figure out, okay, so I have this, I still have it in the basement. I have a planter, a red clay planter I designed. I did the base. So I did two pieces. I had a little watering hole on the side and I wanted it to look like a log. So I figured out how to take the bark from a tree and roll it in the clay on the outer side that I attached to the inner structure to give that texture of bark. But I was,

16:15

red clay you can’t tell what the glazes are going to look like very well because you’re putting it over a very different substrate color so i actually did a blank grid i drew you know lines i scored lines across and i tried different glazes across one side and base glazes in the other to figure out what glaze was going to give me my my favorite bark color so that was Marsha

16:40

pre-engineering days, trying to do a design experiment to pick a glaze color for my clay project. I love that. That was you laying the foundation for your engineering days, for sure. So what I’m hearing from you is hobbies are important. Kids being allowed to make mistakes and learn from them is very important. So what do you think parents can do to help their children be better problem solvers? Because we need that. Our world needs people who aren’t just

17:10

finding and complaining, but are solution oriented in solving problems. Okay. So I’m going to go in a little bit of a tangent here. I’m going to bring in my dog training experience because dogs, good dog trainers teach their dogs to be problem solvers. And actually, I think Dr. Daniel Amon said this in one of his books, you know, it’s, it comes down to notice what you like more than what you don’t. So

17:37

Be positive and reinforcing, but don’t step in to criticize, correct, or complain. So allow your kid, you’ve got to step back and allow your kid to make mistakes, which can be really hard if you want them to be perfect. I mean, my parents, I have to admit, they were helping me with my school projects in third grade. I’d built a big ocean liner like Titanic out of cardboard, and my dad was down there in the basement helping me. And another kid carved.

18:05

a boat out of ivory soap that floated and i thought that kid probably did that on that project entirely himself and what a creative solution so i think the hardest thing is trying to encourage your kids to strive and be excellent provide share provide motivation help them set goals but you need to step back and allow them to choose and then

18:31

Times that you just have to say, hey, wrong is wonderful when you’re learning. I’m not perfect. They’re not going to be perfect. But really, and there’s another rule of thumb that it takes like five or maybe more positive interactions to overcome every negative interaction. And I’ve seen people, you know, with their kids, it’s like, don’t do that. You know better than that. You know, it’s like they’re nagging at their kid continuously or their grandkid.

19:01

Yeah. And that becomes their self-talk, right? As an adult, that’s the voice that they hear is the things that they’re doing wrong and all of that. And I also want to point out the fact that you mentioned your parents weren’t perfect, right? Your dad helped you maybe a little more than he should have. So parents take the stress off. You don’t have to be perfect, right? But you’re right. They’ve got to fail. They got to make mistakes and learn from it. There’s actually a book called Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck.

19:30

Have you heard of that one? I’ve got to look that one up. Yeah, you’ll get the concept within the first short little bit. And it drastically changed how I use positive reinforcement in my home. Because you’re right, if you focus on the negatives, you’re going to get more negatives. If you focus on the positives, that’s going to encourage and build up your kids, right? And so encouraging the process of…

19:54

I love seeing how you overcame that challenge or I see how determined you are versus the finished product of like, wow, that looks amazing. It’s perfect. Yeah. And you need, and I think that’s the other thing, like with dog training, Mooney. Okay. I’ve been learning to train dogs since like 1987. So like over 35 years now, but.

20:18

It wasn’t until I had a seminar with Susan Garrett that it really, the clicker training, I really got it because her mantra was value choice balance. So you, for the dog, okay, the value piece is what are they going to earn as a reward if they get it right? So why should they bother to solve my problem instead of their problem? The choice piece is I’ve got to allow him to make a mistake. So there is, there’s,

20:47

And another side piece is you got to believe it’s possible too. And then the balance is, hey, problem solving is hard work. So you don’t want to sit and do it for eight hours at a time. You need to get up and move and take breaks, change, you know, change it up. Shift gears. If you’re in the zone, that’s another thing. But like for especially for dogs where there’s no verbal communication, I can’t tell him what’s right. He’s trying to figure this all out, just like the game hot or cold. You know, if you’re getting closer, you get feedback that you’re getting warmer. And if you’re not, you get the feedback that’s cold and you can take a different approach. So that’s kind of with dog training, the whole philosophy is, OK,

21:36

My goal might be the box trick where I need Mooney to put all four feet in one box. Okay, I can’t tell him what the goal is. I can lure him in a box, but it’s like getting to a destination using GPS. I don’t learn the route. I’m just having GPS lure me to the destination. And that’s what luring is for dots. Whereas if he’s set up as a problem and there’s a goal, okay, his goal is to earn the treat.

22:02

Okay, so my first reward might be he looked at the box. And I’ve got a big box to start with that’s big enough for him to stand in comfortably. My goal is to get to a really tiny box where he can only get his four feet in. For years, I couldn’t get there because I couldn’t imagine how a big golden retriever could get his feet in a tiny box like that until Susan Garrett said, think about their position when they poo. Ah, got it.

22:29

Okay, so now Marsha believes it’s possible. Now Marsha was able to teach her dogs the box tricks. I love that. Well, and relating it back to kids as well, the parents have to believe their kids can learn through their mistakes. Yes. And it’s actually making them stronger and more capable. And I know it’s hard. It’s hard to watch anybody, whether it’s a friend or family member, your child, whoever it is, make mistakes and be frustrated.

22:59 Tasha

But thinking back to your D in college, that was a defining moment in your life. It was. It changed the course of your future, don’t you think? Definitely. It would have gone very differently. I couldn’t even imagine what career I would have chosen as an alternate to engineering. But I’m so grateful that I chose engineering. The other thing that I had to change to make that transformation possible is I had to take responsibility for my own learning.

23:29 Tasha

I want to clap right now. When I was teaching, I was the same teacher to all my students. It was the kids who took responsibility, the parents who had their kids take responsibility for their learning, as well as, you know, the parents who were teaching them things at home, nothing fancy, but just interacting and educating at home. That makes all the difference in the world. So I hope everybody heard you say taking responsibility for your own learning.

23:57 Tasha

so your parents didn’t come in and go to purdue and say take away her d or right no no no you had to take responsibility and and so i i had to think back okay i’m i’m smart i’m like high school i was basically an a student purdue i was kind of like okay i was number five in a class of like 844 and i had a 2a um two art classes that were level

24:26 Marsha

three as opposed to the accelerated classes which were you know so an a for art counted the same as a c in calculus so and i ended up i still ended up fifth out of 844. but when i thought back to okay um i kind of let my grades slide a little bit you know it’s like okay so the

24:50

b’s there were some a’s and b’s and the occasional c but you know that d was a wake-up call it’s like okay i can’t i can’t slough this off i have to step up and figure out what i’m going to do to change so i thought back to of all things biology in ninth grade maybe because i just aced every test but what i realized

25:13

is i wasn’t studying to pass a test i was studying to learn the material and i understood whether i knew the material or not that’s a huge difference right there anybody most people can study for a test but they don’t retain it yes learning the material locks it in for life right yeah and and when i realized that you know then i realized okay i i can’t it’s not okay to say okay

25:42

the professor didn’t want to teach or the TA didn’t speak English. It’s like he had me thinking, you know, current got invented at notes the way he graded one of my homework papers. It’s like, okay, but it’s on me because I knew I didn’t know that. So a significant thing that happened the next term, okay, EE-201.

26:04

Linear circuit analysis. And I have a 7.30 lecture in a big auditorium with like 300 people and multiple guest tests. And it’s like, oh, no, this is a recipe for disaster. It sure is, especially at that age. But Purdue offered an independent study section. And I transferred into that. So and OK, so this would have been.

26:30

How did you learn about that, by the way? Sorry to interrupt, but how did you learn about the independent? I think the professor mentioned it. He said if you didn’t want to be in this, he mentioned what the other options were. So I started at Purdue in 1977. So this would have been 70, probably spring of 79. So my point is we didn’t have videos. We had tape recorders. So they had lectures on tape recorders. You could go into this.

27:00

study lab and you could listen to the lectures on the tape recorder you could read the book and when and there was homework and you could have there were teaching assistants that would help check your homework and when you were ready you would go up and say i’m ready to take the test so you didn’t take the test until you were ready now the problem with this is that probably 75 of the 75 of the students who switched into independent study didn’t finish the course

27:27

Okay. And I probably finished the last half of the course in the last quarter of the semester. Of course you did. You’re a college kid. That’s what college kids do. But the problem is I passed with an A and I knew the material. And that material, okay, the cool thing about engineering and math is like…

27:51

is math is like differential equations all you have to do is change the name of the variables and you can solve the differential equations for electricity or mechanical engineering or fluid dynamics with the same set of math in fact before there were digital computers there were analog computers because a capacitor in an electrical system is the same as a mass in a mass spring damper system and a resistor

28:19

is the same as a damper. And let’s see, that would lead, the inductor is the same as the spring. So basically you learn how to set, solve one set of differential equations. You can solve it in any discipline you want. I love it. It’s learning the rules. What are the rules? What are the formulas? How do they connect? It’s kind of like life too. Once you learn the rules of life, you can play the game of life better, right? And that’s the whole problem solving thing.

28:46

Purdue I mean I’m sure it’s not just Purdue we had a very rigid here’s your homework problem assumptions you know are given so you do your problem statement what the given information is what your assumptions are and then you’d start on your solution and then you’re supposed to summarize the results and and discuss them at the end but it’s like so you break it down what’s the clearly what is the goal

29:09

What information do you have about the problem? What do you have to assume or guess to make it work or to figure out a solution? And then does your solution make sense? Did it actually solve the problem or did you go off the site? And in life, you can use that basic approach for almost any problem. You may not have the right information. You may not have the right education to solve that problem, but you can probably figure out.

29:35

I got a leak in a pipe. Maybe I need to get a plumber to take a look at it. We have so many resources at our disposal nowadays too. And Google. So many things that you can look up. So it’s not about knowing everything, but if you know how to tackle a problem, you know what, if you can define what the problem is and what the problem isn’t, it’s like a little bit like playing Nancy Drew or MacGyver. It’s kind of like, okay.

30:02

What’s the real, what don’t I know here? What do I need to figure out? And then who can help me figure that out? Absolutely. So do you do that type of problem solving within your books? Can you talk a little bit about your books? First started writing, I was just writing and it’s like, I had an idea in mind, but I had to clarify my message and I realized, okay.

30:24

you know putney and the magic ipad didn’t talk about anything that the books were about and when i got through three books i realized i’m inventing stuff in every book i’m solving problems in book one i introduced rapid prototyping so if book one started out with a a combined science fair art project that was going to be the big drama through the book and and putney was wanting to enter both and the mean

30:49

counselor was said no you got to pick one and she figured out how to do both with one volcano experiment you know but i needed more conflict between her and and the other her nemesis hutney has moved from kodiak alaska her dad’s in the coast guard to um they’re in the savannah air station but they’re same with their great great aunt gertrude on hilton head island so she’s stressed in a terribly different environment and

31:17

So they’re close to the beach in an art class. They’re within a five-minute walk of the beach in their school where they’re located, which was a place that was vacated after Hurricane Matthew and was vacant for years. So I made that my fictional school. But I thought, okay, in Girl Scouts, we had sit-upons. So what better project to throw at the kids than to design their own sit-upons using things that they have on.

31:46

hand at home so they can go sketching at the beach or at the neighborhood lagoon. So it’s actually an art class that she gives her first design project. And Mr. Shelley, who’s named after one of my favorite art teachers, tells them about rapid prototyping. It’s like, hey, just if you’ve got newspaper in a garbage bag, you can make something, you know, figure out what you want then.

32:11

tweak it so Putney and Sue get into this design challenge and Putney also has this cool magic iPad with an amazing AI interface holographic interface who kind of coaches her okay what do you want and you know what’s and they they use this rapid prototyping process with some big IKEA bags to quickly figure out what size it needs to be

32:37

so just by folding it down okay and a very simple math model you know a ruler okay how wide how you know how long how much do you need to cover your your derriere uh and do you want it to carry anything else so your sketch pad some pencils you know it could double as a carrying tote while you’re at it and how much cushion do you need so back in the days in the 60s we had

33:03

we folded newspaper and we actually wove newspaper together for the padding of our citipons and we had a heavy oilskin cloth on both sides the perimeter was punched with holes and there was a heavy cord that we looped through it so these were somewhat heavy but you could tie it around your waist and i thought okay let’s design a citipon for this century

33:25

And so I used bubble wrap and I thought, well, will it pop? So I plopped down on bubble wrap on the patio and it didn’t pop. So it’s like, okay, I have lightweight waterproof padding. I took smaller grocery recyclable bags, the kind of Tyvek bag, and found one with really cool surfboard and old 60s station wagon design on it. It’s like, okay, and then folded it down, figured out how big it needed to be.

33:52

Putney and Sue end up in this competition where each day they’re tweaking their design. And Sue’s attitude is, okay, she’s rich girl. Anything you can do, I can buy better. So she brings in a Smith and Hawkins garden kneeling pad the first day. And Putney’s here with, you know, she did a little sewing. She stitched two seams to cut the bag down to the right side, didn’t change the handles. Day two, Putney’s figured out, well,

34:21

I really want a tarp and she did the tarp with the trash bag at first but day two because she says she’s got marine grade fabric she makes this folding sit upon because she likes Sue’s design it was bigger so she does it she you know takes it out and so she does the folding sit upon option. Sue comes back with one of those backpack beach chairs.

34:45

OK, which is about eight pounds. So it’s a lot heavier. Putney stuff is like under a pound, you know, but it’s got pockets. It’s got a cooler. So, you know, they’re taking two very different approaches to the same problem. And they’re all portable. You know, day three Putney’s figuring out, well, even though I could expand the sit upon in one go, I really want more of a tarp underneath me to lay out my stuff. So she adds a tarp to her folding sit upon option.

35:15

And Sue comes back with a tripod chair that’s a little bit lighter, but it’s still a chair. And then day four, Putney comes back with, she goes back to her original concept because she liked the cool artwork. But she makes a custom handle, so she’s got the nice crossbody strap on it. It’s lighter weight. It’s got a zipper opening. She can stick her…

35:40

our sketch pad in there and she can fold the tarp in there too so she’s got the tarp you know and it’s a little bit lighter weight than the folding solution and sue comes back with um i guess you’d call it a stadium chair which is you know it’s folds but it lays on the ground so you know so sue’s going the expensive i can throw money at this which is not fair

36:03

I know life’s not fair. And, you know, but as a kid, if I was reading that, I’d be like rooting for the other kid, right? But the thing is, it’s like you can throw money at things and not come up with as good of a solution. That’s what I love that you’re teaching because kids are going to read it and be like, this isn’t fair. But it’s like, but that doesn’t mean just because there’s fancy stuff that it’s going to work any better. Right. And the other thing is that.

36:32

you know we didn’t have a lot of money growing up um and what i’ve read since is like hey having less stuff makes you more creative because you got to get more inventive you’re so much more resourceful when you have less materials and have to actually study those materials and determine how to make them work right

36:53

yes and so that’s why you know anyhow so that’s why i ended up writing these books which i my goal is to create a Nancy Drew meets MacGyver kind of feeling so that you get the the brave Nancy Drew who’s the champion for the weaker very integrity um solving mysteries but the mysteries are more science and invention related so kind of a young

37:22

young MacGyver and not heavy off the deep end in all the science and the math. But you have me wanting to read them. You really do. You have me wanting to read them because I’m already bought into the characters and who I want to win. And the other cool thing I’m working on this year, people have been asking me about this for a few years, but because of the homeschool conference, I wanted to try to think, what can I do to really help homeschoolers make these books?

37:50

even better for them. And a principal where I did a school visit with once said, you know, if you had experiments to go with your books, now you’d really have something. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, I just spent four separate hours leading the buoyancy experiment for four different classes at this school. But one of my fiction coaches said, he’s told me the same thing, you know, as a parent, I would love to have six to eight projects I could do with my kid.

38:19

based on your book and when i was asking other homeschool author friends um they were saying novel study and the you know instead of individual experiments do one resource with all of that and so that’s what i’m working on i will have seven experiments for this first book putney the secret of the magic ipad

38:40

Plus I’ll be doing novel study and I’ll have like a crossword puzzle and vocabulary so that you’ll get to dig deeper into the story. And so you can fulfill your English and science and math requirements with one of my books. I love that. And, you know, I’m not a homeschooling parent. I’m also, of course, attending the Midwest Homeschool Expo, June 28th in Indianapolis. Very excited about it. But even though I’m not a homeschooling parent, that is something that I would want in my home. Right. Because we want kids exploring and learning and being curious and using their hands and getting away from devices.

39:20

Yes, and I think that is the thing. I mean, I’ve been volunteering with Girl Scouts of Western Ohio since 2015. I’ve been developing experiments for their Year of the Girl STEM Summer Camp when they added that in 2016. So I love working with kids. I really feel like middle school especially is a magic age because they…

39:42

know enough to grasp some of the harder concepts and they’re pre-algebra and I can change their attitudes about math and show them the magic of math and why they want to bother to learn it. The hardest thing I ever did in seventh grade, I think it was, it was maybe pre-algebra or algebra one, but I got a C on a test.

40:08

I could not understand word problems. I was struggling with word problems. So I had to do a very hard thing. I had to go to the teacher and ask for help. And I stayed after school to get that help. And it took me a while to get the trick of word problems. But once I got it, I absolutely loved it. And that set me up for success. So the teachers out there, they just want you to succeed. So if you struggle with something.

40:36

Don’t let an older relative who struggled with algebra change your attitude about it. My mother told me, oh, physics is hard. I didn’t take physics until senior year. And I loved it. So don’t listen to your parents if they weren’t good at a subject. Yeah, you are your own person. You are your own person. Believe you can do it. In third grade, I thought, good grief. I’m never going to be able to learn the multiple takes.

41:06

multiplication tables and i stressed out about that for like 10 minutes before i realized well my sister had to do it i’m related to her if she can do it it’s probably possible i guess i can do so i stopped stressing about whether i could do it and just worked at it so if you just say hey i can do it don’t even worry about whether you can um the other thing i struggled with because

41:33

Probability and statistics was always taught the last week of the school year, so I never really got comfortable with it. So in my mind, I was always telling myself I’m bad at probability and statistics. First of all, watch your mental language because words matter. Our brains are like computers. They believe the words. We feed them. So feed your brains positive messages. And when I was working on my Ph.D.,

42:01

um i was doing some really cool experiments and i needed to understand probability and statistics and i was you know so i took a couple probability and statistics course at ud and because i had a purpose i had a relevance okay that’s the other big secret parents motivation leads to success it has two dimensions one is

42:22

expectation for success and perceived relevance so if you think it’s useful you’re more likely to be motivated to learn it and if you believe you can do it you’re more likely to do it and you can set yourself up with smaller steps so you know Back to the box trick for Mooney. I didn’t ask him to put his feet into a tiny box. I asked him to notice the large box. I rewarded him for that. And when he put a foot in, he got another reward for that until he had all four feet in. Once he got the problem, I could make it harder by making the box smaller. So back to probability and statistics, they were my favorite classes at University of Dayton. I learned so much. I did this cool analysis and, you know, it’s like, so don’t.

43:08

tell yourself because you struggled with something earlier that you can’t do it now just monitor your motivation make sure you are motivated to learn the subject ask your teacher your parents for help if you can’t see the point of learning this material and then just figure out how to make yourself believe that you can do it

43:28 Tasha

I love that. Such great words to live by, Marsha. I cannot wait to meet you in person. It’ll be so much fun. So we will definitely connect in June, on June 28th, of course, in Indianapolis, right? Probably want to get in touch with you. So how can they get connected to you? Of course, I’ll include the link to your website. Do you have any freebies or promotions that you want to ask as well? Yes. So I have a three volcano experiment bundle, which will be featured in the upcoming resource guide for this.

43:57 Marsha

Secret of the Magic iPad. So that is hot off the presses, still in the process of proofreading, getting feedback, seeing if I need to change some figures around. But we have the papier-mâché volcano featured in book one. Okay, that’s a papier-mâché structure. I actually made this with two of my great-nephews in Virginia and painted it, and we did a dry ice volcano. So experiment number two is the dry ice volcano.

44:23

I’ve also done that in a dog dish with the blocks of ice I get with Mooney’s Ollie Fresh Pet Food. So there’s different ways to do the dry ice volcano. And then the third common volcano experiment is baking soda and vinegar. And I figured out a way to waterproof my papier-mâché volcano so that you can do vinegar and baking soda even with a papier-mâché structure. My girl just did that the other day.

44:50

almost 10 year old and an almost four year old and they were playing with baking soda and vinegar it’s such a fun experiment so i cannot wait to see that it is and what i discovered every experiment i tackle i kind of make it my own because it’s like okay i gotta try one more thing would it work better with this do i need to mix this with water first do i need to you know add the soap to trap the oxygen and you know and with the paper mache it’s like i was stressing out it’s like

45:14

There’s got to be a way to waterproof this more easily than spraying with Krylon or something. So plastic tablecloth, that’s my secret. And it suspended the cup. So it’s super easy. And I’ve got the experiments include either step-by-step photos or in most cases, videos as well. So you can see actually what I did. And, you know, I went over the top with vinegar and baking soda because I ended up with like.

45:40

I did a couple before I did it in the volcano, and then I did another three tests with the volcano to figure out what gave me the best reaction. Oh, so fun. You live your books. I do. Which I love in real time, and you’re writing about it and creating experiments for all of us to benefit. So thank you so much, Marsha. I’ll make sure that your website is…

46:02

in the captions or whatever it’s called. Yeah. So if you sign up to get my copy of the Volcano Bundle, you’ll be added to my email list and you can just reply to any of my emails and I will get your note. I read everything. So you can ask me any questions you want. If you have any suggestions for future experiments or plots for future books, just reply and let me know. All right. Thank you, Marsha. I appreciate your time today. Thanks so much.

46:37 Tasha

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Diary of a Dreamer. I hope you found the stories and tips shared today to be a source of motivation and strength. Remember, every challenge you face is a chance to grow and move closer to your dreams. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast with anyone who could use a boost of encouragement. Please check out my website, TashaEizinger.com.