Hazardous waste lecture need not be deadly boring
Staff find hazardous words, win a game
Who says teaching the terminology of hazardous waste has to be dull?
Certainly not Vanessa Massey, RN, education coordinator of Tennessee Nursing of Knoxville in Morristown, TN, a full-service agency that serves 23 counties in eastern Tennessee.
The agency has no hazardous waste materials. But teaching staff about hazardous waste and chemicals is a requirement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of Washington, DC.
So Massey thought about different ways she could teach the material. First, she showed the staff videos about hazardous chemicals, and then she gave a lecture on the topic.
But when it came to teaching the terminology of hazardous waste, she wanted to do something a little less traditional.
"I was trying to think of something that would be more interesting," Massey says.
She picked out some common hazardous waste words and put these into a word search format. Then she gave copies of the game to a class of up to 10 employees. The first person to find all the words won a candy bar.
"It went over real well, and it made it more of a lively atmosphere," Massey recalls.
(See Massey’s word finding game, below.)
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