Go Ahead and Call Me a Square.

A bunch of years ago I was a teacher in Brooklyn, NY. I taught Special Education, Science and English to what can universally be seen as the worst age range of kids to have to teach anything…

Middle schoolers.

Oh man. The noises, smells, awkwardness, hormones and testing of boundaries….. It was all absolutely fantastic! The kids that I taught were brilliant in their inventiveness when it came to distracting from the work we were doing. Knowing my fleeting attention span, they were Rembrandts at getting me off topic. A lesson on planetary orbits or energy conversion was always one comment away from devolving into a heated debate on who would reign victorious in Mario Kart (N64) – the kids or me.

A debate decisively ended when I reeled it in and mercilessly demolished every student challenger (and teacher adversaries too – bite it, Mr. Schilling). These kids were stubborn, yet contenders. It was hard to teach them anything. But there is one demographic that has proved more difficult than middle schoolers…

My own children.

It doesn’t matter what the lesson is – if I’m the one teaching it – they reject any and all attempts at learning. I am without any shred of doubt, the best swimmer in the Northern hemisphere…I swam competitively. I was an ocean lifeguard for a decade and still swim about two miles per week. But when it came time for me to teach them to swim, they regarded me as the Kraken, sent to pull them down into the depths of the abyss.

Seriously? WTF. Now… should a complete stranger have come along, an individual who has never seen or been in water his entire life, and offered awful tips on swimming – that advice would have been followed with the utmost precision.

STRANGER: “Put your hands in your pockets, tie a brick to your ankle and just sort of….. Inhale every time water is in your face.”

MY KIDS: “You bet!”

Needless to say, any time I tried to get my kids to learn any lesson, it ended up with me being frustrated, the kids yelling at one another and someone inevitably crying (again, me).

Having been a teacher, I know how important it is to foster active engagement. Lessons that are fun, relatable and exciting seep into the brain without ever seeming like you’re actually teaching. So when I got the BOSEbuild Speaker Cube, I actually had moderately low expectations that making this project was going to go well. I mean, the kids and I would get it done, but I’d for sure deal with at least a dozen meltdowns before we finished. Any other science project I’d attempted with them in the past always seemed like a rush to get to the conclusion without ever actually absorbing the outcome.

MY KIDS: “We want this volcano to erupt, damn it! Who cares how it happens!!??”

I was beyond shocked at how well it actually went. We downloaded the BOSEbuild Sound app to my iPhone, laid out all of the building materials and with my fingers crossed, we started.

Every single step to this was amazing. It wasn’t just a speaker kit with a few facts thrown in for good measure. It’s one of the few speakers that we believe sound surprisingly great for its small size. The app actually teaches you and your kids about the science of sound, vibrations and the mechanics behind each and every step. My son, three days later, is still talking about how cool it was that the box it came in became a speaker.

This was legitimately the best time I have had teaching my kids anything. They got along with each other the whole time (which is no minor miracle) and left really understanding what’s happening when sound is being produced in their new speaker.

The speaker itself, incidentally, is fantastic. Once it was built they went to instant dance-party mode. My suggestions of Animal Collective and Wolf Parade to kick off the music was quickly voted down in favor of the Trolls soundtrack which is pretty killer, too.

The sound it makes is significantly better than I would have expected for something made for kids to build. They certainly aren’t just getting some toy speaker – this speaker has Bose-quality sound. I’m a bit of an audiophile and this thing is legit. Deep bass, clear highs and rich mids pour out of it. Now the problem is trying to keep it for myself instead of letting them have it.

So this summer I would STRONGLY suggest getting one of these. A rainy day is going to come along and if you pull this out, you AND your kids are going to be super engaged for a number of hours. Then at the end, they’ll have a customizable speaker that lights up, has excellent sound and will be an actual source of pride for them… and you!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was a sponsored post on behalf of BOSEbuild, however the rigors behind getting my kids to learn something is ALL on me. To learn more about BOSEbuild and this killer project, check them out here, as well as on Facebook and Twitter .