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Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into methods for teaching and learning for professionals like you.

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Alright, so Patrick Murphy, let's dive a little deeper into some topics that are very important to you. Where shall we start today?

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Let's start off with teaching the unteachable. Quick little background, I spent seven years in a classroom after being a contractor and a technician and various other things in the industry.

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And I did wind up in the classroom with the usual routine of here's the keys.

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But in the state that I was teaching in, they did also require you to spend a year, one night a week, with teaching management skills.

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Oh, really?

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And as Ty Brenneman said just a few weeks ago, everybody's going to have a good day and a bad day.

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Right.

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But it's the instructor's responsibility to be efficient and thorough. And that's all part of education and generating good circumstances that the student may have in any issue.

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Now, I took that a step further naturally and got myself in a little trouble because I actually used to write into my lesson plans the iRaid Boss Day.

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Okay, what is that?

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What it really was was, you know, the boss got out of bed, he stepped on the dog. When he was making his coffee, he made it wrong. It was too sweet.

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He's drinking it in the car on the way to the office, slams on the brakes, spills some on himself, gets stopped by a cop.

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And when he gets in the office, there's one of his men laying on the sheet metal table, hung over, and the boss is not happy.

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Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

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And bosses do start to scream and yell at times.

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Right.

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But when you're in the classroom, how do you approach that and not really wind up being in trouble for using the colorful language?

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How do you professionally address that? Because it's a different environment in the classroom than what it was, say, at the shop.

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Yeah, it's a totally different environment. What I used to literally do is write into my lesson plans the iRaid Boss Day.

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And I would come in for that day and I would just be a pain in the neck.

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What are you doing it that way for? That's not the right way to do it.

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You know better than that. Come on.

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But what it really boiled down to was, you know, you'll have circumstances where the students who have never been yelled at will have an instance where if you raise your voice, they leave your class.

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Right. They feel threatened.

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And somehow you have to go back out and get them out of the hallway and say, listen, you know, bosses are going to do this.

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They are going to yell and scream at times.

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I had one guy, he was in the class, and we got him a job shadowing.

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He was late for work every day for the first week that he was there.

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Oh, geez.

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He came back into the classroom.

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The boss called me up and when he came back into the classroom, I took one look at him and I said, do you know why you were just fired?

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He said, I didn't do anything wrong.

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I said, well, I do know what you did wrong.

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You're supposed to show up on time.

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Be ready to work.

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That was eight o'clock for your company.

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You showed up after eight o'clock every day with your McDonald's breakfast.

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You got to leave early enough to have your breakfast before you get there so you're ready to work.

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He unfortunately couldn't understand that.

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And that was one of the reasons he was let go from that particular job.

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I had another one where this young man shows up first day of school, he's late.

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And I just look at him and I say, you know, you got to get in here on time.

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Because this is your job.

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This class for the next two years, 180 days each year, is your job.

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You show up on time.

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First thing you did on my grading sheet was if you showed up on time and were at your desk and ready to go, you got five points.

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And your paycheck was that total for every day.

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Oh, nice.

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Well, that's an interesting perspective.

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What used to happen was if you showed up on time, you were ready to go, you already earned five points.

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In this instance, he showed up late the first day, shows up late the second day.

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And I raise it up a notch.

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You know, you got to be in here on time.

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Third day, he shows up late and I say, get up here.

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And he gets up next to me and I say, why are you late?

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And he mumbles in my ear.

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And I asked him again, why are you late?

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And he mumbles again.

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And I asked him a third time and he finally said in a loud enough voice because I had to take my son to the school's nursery.

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And I looked at him, I said, how old is your son?

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He said three months.

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And my entire body just shook.

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Yeah, it kind of changes the perspective a little bit.

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This young man was 16 years old.

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Wow.

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And by the end of the class, he was the best kid in the class.

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Right.

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But during that year, we had circumstances where, you know, a couple of times he would call up and say, I can't make it to class today.

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The babysitting service is closed today for some reason.

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Sure.

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It's not there.

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Well, after once or twice, I said, bring the baby in.

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We'll put the baby in the office.

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And we will take care of the baby while you continue to learn the subject.

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He couldn't believe it that I would do that.

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And naturally, I checked ahead of time to make sure it was OK.

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Yeah.

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You don't want to break clear with school policies.

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Yes.

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And he wound up being an absolutely fantastic student.

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So you have circumstances where, you know, you have to work with the student, even though they're tough to teach and they're unteachable in some instances.

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You mentioned the other day, phones.

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Yeah, that's a big thing.

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Yeah, a lot of our teachers are struggling with how do you handle phones in a classroom?

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It depends upon the school's protocols.

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Now, when I was in the classroom, phones were totally forbidden.

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And I had one student who literally when I told him to put the phone away for the fourth or fifth time, he told me he was going to have his big brother talk to me.

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So, you know, he wasn't unteachable, but he just had, you know, he had this different mindset shoulder.

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And that chip on his shoulder made it very tough to get through to him.

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So you have to go through these things and have these written plans in place beforehand.

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You know what you're doing with your students.

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That's over and above what you're going to be teaching them because you have to handle all the different circumstances that they're going to run into out there in the field.

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And that may have been one of the things I was least prepared for when I started teaching is that it's not just a teaching role.

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I mean, you're becoming a mentor for these young minds.

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And you were not always taught that that's going to be part of our expectation is that we're teaching, but we are mentoring and we are learning and developing these young minds.

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And there's so much depth to it.

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Yes.

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And one of the advantages I had in my classroom was that I had a well, a multiple, multiple culture classroom in regard to I had high school students all the way up to guys whose factories had closed and they were being retrained.

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Sure. Absolutely.

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And literally one day, I couldn't find this one student, his seat was filled.

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He was 60 years old. Wow. And I go looking all over the classroom for him I finally get down to his seat and I look.

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And I go, Victor, is that you.

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And he looks up at me because, yeah. I said, What did you do.

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He said I was tired of sticking out in front of the, the other students he said so I dyed my hair. Really. Yes. Okay to blend in.

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That's how diverse my classroom was sure and you have to work with all of them. Some of the students now that are older also act as mentors in the classroom.

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And, you know, when you start to consider where most of the training takes place in the industry.

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It's usually not in the classroom, unfortunately, right. It's usually guys having a discussion at the counter of the supply house.

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And unfortunately sometimes those discussions lead to the wrong information. Yeah, absolutely.

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And that's, that's one of the things you have to counter as going out because I didn't only just teach in a classroom. Eventually I wound up spending five years teaching on the road for a major manufacturer.

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And you'd get into a circumstance where you have 40 people in the room with various different levels of experiences and education. Yeah, and experiences and you would, you'd wind up having to explain some things that were very basic that you shouldn't really have to explain at the top of the level.

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So, you know, we all have to engage the, the students. And when I say students, it's at all levels, all ages of experiences. We, we, we are also entertainers.

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One of the reasons we have to be entertainers is we have to keep their attention. Yeah, absolutely. Especially with our younger generations that have a very short attention span.

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And one of the problems I found actually in the classroom was that some of the students never took notes.

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Oh, sure. And we had other instructors who literally used to grade their notebooks.

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I was like, Oh, why do I want to grade a notebook when it's, it's so much work and so much extra work. And I finally looked at this one student one day and I said, you know, you never take a note. Why? Right.

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He said, I listen very carefully. He said, if I stop to write notes down, I lose your train of thought.

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And I get totally lost. I never can get it back. That's an interesting perspective. You have to work with all the different students and you have to learn that information very quickly in the classroom. Right.

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Because it's, it's critical that you tailor all your training to the student, whether that students at the top of his game or the bottom of his game.

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And then you hope that all the students working together will teach each other because that's the way out in the field that it really goes is because they're teaching each other when they're working in on the job.

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And that's it. When you get out in the field, you know, you know who is weak and who is strong in certain topics. And when you get stuck on one, you know, you know who you're calling.

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Yes. So building that camaraderie, we've talked about that a little bit is building the camaraderie in the classrooms. Is there any ways that you can encourage building that camaraderie? Well, to encourage that camaraderie, you have to make sure that they all understand that they're going to go out in the field and they're going to work with older people and younger people.

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And they have to be tolerant of each other. That's a tough thing to teach. Yeah, you have to allow them to have some fun. You have to allow them to joke a little bit. You have to allow them to go off the rate, off the range a few times. Sure.

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I will literally tell you one time I was playing a video. All right. And they're all supposed to be watching the video and the video kept stopping and starting. And I couldn't figure out what was going on. I figured the VCR machine was bad or something like that.

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Sure. This was a little bit before we could use computers and anything else. And they're all giggling. They're laughing. They're having a great old time. And I finally saw one guy in the front of the classroom with his hand on his wrist. He had a watch that would control the VCR.

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Oh, a pro-crimble remote watch. Okay. I looked at this and I just, I started to crack up. I was like, what am I going to do with you? Yeah. A number of years later when I was out in the field doing manufacturer training, there he was. Probably still with technology too, I bet.

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Still with technology, still doing HVACR work. And when I saw him going to be in the classroom, I said, I want your watch. And everybody was like, what are you taking the watch for? I said, listen, and I told the story to the rest of the group of 30 or 40 people and they said, he did what?

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Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you have to be tolerant. You have to let them work together. You have to let them teach each other, but you also have to be right there to work at correcting some of those mistakes.

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Sure. I think that was probably the thing I was most ill-prepared for was understanding how to control that classroom and understanding that we're not there just to learn the technical side.

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You know, a lot of people can teach the technical. Being a good educator in a classroom is about being able to manage people as well as manage your content.

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Yes.

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A lot to unpack in that.

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Yeah. That softening your senses routine.

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Yeah.

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Unfortunately, in the state I taught in, and it's not unfortunate, but there was a requirement if you saw abuse of some nature, you had to report it. I did have to report, but I had a student and he was constantly falling asleep.

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And I moved him to the front of the classroom saying, maybe he just needs more reinforcement and such. After I don't know how many days, I finally asked him to come into my office and close the door. I said, what's going on?

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And he sheepishly looks at me and he goes, my parents are making me sleep in the garage.

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Really?

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And now I'm like, oh.

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Right. Now it's time to dive a little deeper.

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I have to go report this. I said, why?

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And he said, well, I've been going out, hanging out with my buddies till one or two o'clock in the morning. I went, oh, okay, wait a minute.

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It might be self-inflicted.

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Something that unfortunately you're inflicting on yourself.

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Yeah.

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I said, you can go to work tomorrow after being out till one or two o'clock in the morning and properly run all the refrigerant tubing.

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He said, well, no, I guess not. I said, well, that would be a problem.

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I said, especially for the other guys working with you, because you would become a safety hazard.

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Absolutely.

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Which is another thing you have to teach. The safety in the classroom is critical to make sure nobody gets hurt.

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There were many instances where I had to ask guys to take off their necklaces.

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Now you wouldn't think gold chains hanging around the guys' necks is a problem.

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But I said, when you lean over and you've got a condenser fan in front of you, I said, you don't want that gold chain to get caught in the condenser fan.

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Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a mess.

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You don't want to damage the gold chain. And they'd look at me and go, what about the fan?

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I said, I'm not worried about the fan. I'm worried about the chain getting caught in the fan and then pulling your face into it.

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Exactly.

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And that's just one of the things that you run into.

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Sometimes doing things like you're out in the field and you use an experience from the field to teach the students in the classroom by saying, look,

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there's a leak somewhere in your system. You have to find it.

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Now, in our classroom, we had 30 condensing units set up with coils in boxes with plastic on the front of it. And I could create a leak, which I did more than once.

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But every year they had to pipe them out. They were allowed to see what was there.

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Then they had to tear all the piping out and they had to re-pipe it.

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And they were most of the time very successful at it, but they would get leaks.

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And I always arrived a little early and it was more than once somebody wound up with a loose wire, a loose flare nut, or if we were doing electrical, a loose electrical connection or a changed electrical connection.

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Nothing's a safety issue, but just enough so that we knew they were gaining the experience looking for leaks.

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Because I had one circumstance where years ago we leak checked a system that had been installed in a supermarket for three days.

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I tell you what, let's turn this one into another show.

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I thought this is one we can dive deep into just on that one.

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So Patrick Murphy, thank you so much for joining us today.

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And yeah, we'll come right back and have a deep dive into one of our tills from the trenches.

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Thanks, Clinton. Talk to you later.