The nature of materials.
Teaching Stress and Strain Through Stories: Two Audiobook Essays for My Students
I've been teaching engineering for over twenty years, and one thing I've learned is that formulas don't stick. Stories do.
This semester I tried something different. I took the content from my actual classroom presentations—the demonstrations, the stories, the ways I explain stress and strain to students standing at the whiteboard—and turned them into two audiobook essays. Companion pieces they can listen to outside of class, letting the ideas settle in without the pressure of copying down equations.
The material is all mine. The silly putty demonstration I do every semester. The Saturn story I've been telling for years. The way I explain yielding by asking students to think about what that word actually means. The rod experiment that motivates why we normalize to stress and strain. This is how I teach. It's how I've taught for two decades.
Why audiobooks? Neuroscience shows that when we engage multiple senses, we signal to the brain that the content matters — that this is something important, something worth encoding deeply. Reading engages one pathway. Listening engages another. Doing a demonstration with your hands, another. The more channels, the stronger the signal: pay attention, this matters, remember this.
So I wanted to give students another sensory channel. The same content they hear in class, available in audio form for review. Not replacing the classroom experience, but reinforcing it through a different modality.
I collaborated with two AI systems — Grok from xAI and Claude from Anthropic — to organize my teachings into something that flows as spoken word. But here's what I really want to share, because I think it matters for anyone exploring how to work with AI:
Working with AI can be generative, not passive.
The interaction opens threads. It sends you to new materials, inspires more reading — not mindless consumption. You read a book, then discuss it with AI. Call it a silicon book club. Those conversations lead to new questions, new books, new threads to follow. This year I had to buy a new bookshelf to hold all the books I bought after following threads that started in AI conversations.
That's what learning with AI can look like. Not a shortcut. Not outsourcing your thinking. A thinking partner that expands what you explore, that pushes you into territory you wouldn't have found alone.
If you're an educator, a lifelong learner, someone curious about how AI fits into genuine intellectual work — I'd encourage you to try it. Bring something you know deeply. Talk it through with AI. See where it leads. You might be surprised how much more you end up reading, not less.
Part 1: Feeling the Forces
The first essay, Feeling the Forces: How Materials Carry the Load, covers the fundamentals. Stress as the internal redistribution of external forces. Strain as the proportional response. The constitutive model that ties them together.
But it's built around a story. A colleague shows up with a collection of metal rods—same shape, same dimensions, different materials—and asks: can I hang a mass from one of these? Will it hold? How much will it stretch?
So we poke it. We load it incrementally, record the response, plot the data. A straight line emerges. We test another rod, same geometry, different material—different slope. Same geometry, different response. The difference must be the material itself.
That observation motivates everything that follows. Why we normalize force to stress and elongation to strain. Why the slope of the stress-strain curve is a material property, not a specimen property. What a constitutive model actually is and why it matters.
And here's the insight I wanted students to walk away with: that rod, loaded elastically, is behaving as a spring. Hooke's Law connects the material science to the physics they already know. Every beam, every column, every structural element loaded within its elastic range is fundamentally a spring. The constitutive model lets us separate what belongs to the geometry from what belongs to the material.
Part 2: When Materials Give Way
The second essay, When Materials Give Way, picks up where the first one ends. We'd been talking about elastic behavior—load it, it deforms, unload it, it returns. But what happens when we push too hard?
The material yields.
I wanted students to sit with that word. Yield. It means to give up. To surrender. To stop fighting. We ask the material to carry more and more load, and in the elastic range it resists, it pushes back, it holds the line. But at some point we ask too much, and the material yields. It gives way.
From there, the essay explores how metals and polymers yield through completely different mechanisms. Metals are crystalline—atoms in formation, planes that can slip, dislocations that move like wrinkles in a rug. Polymers are molecular spaghetti—long chains tangled together, sliding past each other when given enough time and thermal energy.
This is where the demonstrations come in—the ones I actually do in class, now captured in a form students can revisit.
I talk about the paperclip. I have students bend one back and forth. Feel it stiffen with each bend as dislocations tangle and pile up. Feel the work hardening happening in your hands. Then feel it break when there's no ductility left. They experience the concept before I name it.
I talk about silly putty. In class, I roll it into a rod, pull it slowly—it flows, the molecules have time to reorient and go with the flow. Roll it back up, pull it fast—it snaps clean. Same material, completely different response. I buy silly putty for all my students to take home. Every time they play with it, they're reinforcing the lesson. Now, when they listen to the audiobook, they can do the demonstration themselves, in their dorm room, with their own putty.
And I tell the Saturn story.
Years ago, Saturn ran TV ads showing shopping carts bouncing off their polymer body panels. No dents. Then they stopped running those ads, and I thought I knew why.
One winter day I was at a gas station with my son when I heard a screech and a bang. A car had struck the side of a Saturn. I went to check on the people—they were fine. But the door panel hadn't dented. It had shattered. Like glass. The cold weather had pushed that polymer past its ductile-to-brittle transition.
I picked up a fragment and put it in my pocket. Showed it to my next class. That piece of shattered door panel taught more about temperature-dependent material behavior than any equation ever could.
Why Audiobooks?
It goes back to that neuroscience insight. The classroom engages certain channels: visual (the whiteboard, the demonstrations), auditory (my voice explaining), kinesthetic (bending the paperclip, pulling the silly putty). When students listen to the audiobook later, they're reinforcing through another exposure, another context, another signal to the brain that this matters.
Students have earbuds in while walking across campus, driving home, doing laundry. The audiobook meets them in those moments — not as a shortcut, but as reinforcement. Same content, different channel, deeper encoding.
And there's something about the spoken word that invites a different kind of attention. You can't skim audio. You have to let it unfold at its own pace. That slower engagement gives ideas time to take root.
The Bigger Picture
There's a shift happening — students becoming passengers rather than drivers in their relationship with technology. These audiobooks are part of my response to that.
But they're also a demonstration of something I hope others will explore: AI as a partner, not a replacement. The AI didn't know about silly putty demonstrations or shattered Saturn doors. It couldn't. That knowledge comes from twenty years in the classroom. What AI could do was help organize that knowledge, structure it, shape it into a new form. That's the partnership model that makes both parties more capable.
The goal isn't to make things easier. It's to make things stick. To build mental models that let students reason about problems before they reach for formulas. To give them physical artifacts — silly putty, a shattered door panel, the memory of bending a paperclip — that anchor abstract concepts in lived experience.
When a student can close their eyes and see dislocations gliding through a crystal lattice, or chains sliding past each other in a polymer melt, or a rod behaving as a spring under load — that's when they own the material. That's when they become engineers, not just people who can plug numbers into software.
The formulas matter. But the seeing comes first.
Both audiobook essays are available to my students through our course materials. If you're an educator interested in this approach, feel free to reach out.
Link to my Drop Box Below
