My Colleague Called Me A "Hard Ass"

This is a sanitized and updated version of what I wrote to AE Dreyfuss (of http://www.pltl.org) on 6th December, 2010:

My colleague called me a "hard ass." She said I was too hard. She said I forced students to work too much and solve every assigned problem during (Intro Chemistry) workshops. She said I had no heart (or something like that), that I showed no lenience. She said I rode my workshop leaders hard and made sure they solved every assigned problem, lest they become lenient (she was referring to the time when I was her workshop coordinator).

In my defense, I had the best intentions in mind. I had chosen problems (working with the course' professor) that would expose the students to a range of problems, so that they would be fully equipped with the tools that the course was supposed to confer to them by the time they were done with it. A little lenience, as I saw it, could make a student a friend, but it would result in the students' suffering from a lack of a tool in their belt later down the line. The students' not realizing what tool was missing, or how they were misusing it, would cause them further pains. That is a message I could never get my workshop leaders to understand.

Right now, that workshop leader and I are both grad students in the EE Department. What's more, my first assigned undergraduate helper says he first saw me when I barged into his workshop leader's session (no, his workshop leader was not the one that called me a "hard ass," but he was a student in the same time frame) to give some instructions about some question. When I see how hard working he is, and how much he had to struggle because his workshop leader had been 'nice' and had skipped certain questions -- despite my explicit instructions -- it just makes me mad. A person who works so diligently, and perseveres in the face of extreme academic and work pressures should not have to suffer because his instructor decided to play the nice guy.

Now, here's why I'm writing all this: Do instructors who take the time to cover every aspect of what a student should know, and who try to ensure that their students are well prepared, all end up as people whose colleagues call them a "hard ass?" It bothers me. The instructors with the best lectures in the EE Department are not the most popular graders. The most dreaded math instructor in all of engineering school (and one of the students got up in this full professor's class and called him a "jackass") delivers the best lectures that I have seen anywhere -- and yet, I tremble in fear in his classes; I have been more composed walking along the edge of a rooftop:

In fact, I have been less frightened at gun point (though, that happened a very long time ago) -- and his lectures are a real draw (I'm making a drug reference to illustrate my affinity to his lectures). You see the two extremes that I'm talking about?

What I am wondering is what kind of a person will I become? I now also have a new undergrad, from another college, courtesy of a professor who is also on my research project. When I deal with this student I realize I have developed some of the traits that I used to hate in my professors. Some times I intimidate even my friends when I tell them my attitude towards accomplishing certain tasks: "You do it, you live; else, you die." Some times, I feel like my own father, when he calmly just stood back and watched his son swallowing water, and nearly drowning -- simply for a lack of following simple, extremely explicit instructions. I find that I make certain demands of students, based on their past lecture material (i.e., I expect them to recall material quickly, or to look them up -- repeatedly, if necessary -- and solve problems independently), I expect them to fill in the gaps in their knowledge very quickly (it is a demand I make on myself) and I expect them to apply that knowledge towards the understanding of research papers and advanced concepts, as well as the setup and conduct of experiments. I find that unlike the professor who first trained me to work in a lab, I don't like to wade students into the water, letting them adjust their feet to the cold -- I prefer to just dump my students off the side of a speed boat, to watch them struggle, and to push their heads down into the water if they are not struggling enough (I think this is a remnant of my workshop days, when I was only to ensure that they learned to find their way around problems, so that they could solve them, themselves -- I still insist on never providing solutions). I find that I am harsh, I am cruel, and I give them extremely strict rules.

I find that the more effort that I put into presenting material to my students the more demanding I become of them -- and I think my presentation is not too shabby, because my former students still tell me they learned a lot from me, and (while I was not supposed to do this) I still get compliments for giving clear lectures in the area of quantum chemistry -- the students say that I demystified, whereas their instructors had left them convoluted; in fact, I often found that I could not get them to understand enough to solve a single problem if I did not give that lecture, myself. I tend to feel that I deserve the students' attention, given how much effort I put into the delivery of material (and I treat my professors with the same respect), and I think this is part of the reason that, when it comes to theory, I can be rather demanding.

Of course, my being a what my student from the other college referred to as "Army Major" I am not worried about. Given my bad experiences with ill-advised procedures I do not want my students performing a procedure that could very well detonate like a bomb (which could have happened, but never did, thankfully), nor waterboard themselves (in a sink) to wash toxic chemicals from their eyes, nor strip stark naked to check that they did not spill cancer causing, vitriolic chemicals (by nature, not just by name) on their clothes -- I still remember the horror in the eyes of the guy who witnessed me in the act. The way I see it: If it can kill you, then treat it like it will. There's a reason my friends, in the US Marines, have gun rules like (a) treat a gun as if it is fully loaded and ready to fire, unless you have confirmed otherwise (b) do not point a gun unless you intend to shoot (c) do not put your finger into the guard unless you are ready to shoot, so on, and so forth: mishandling can get people hurt. The same goes with things in my lab: the lasers can blind you -- they can also burn you, as I found out the day I saw a Star Wars style space battle being fought on my hand -- while the chemicals can get you light headed, nauseous, drowsy (take my word for it), and high, and can make you pass out, and they can give you cancer, not to mention take away your (at least a guy's) ability to have kids. Not to mention, some of my chemicals are also volatile, and explosive. So, I think I have ample reason to treat the things in my lab as dangerous items that need to be dealt with with due respect. My student from that other college may not understand (or she may not want to understand), but in order to earn my trust, so that I allow a student to work with something potentially hazardous, that student will need to be able to perform tasks at the drop of a hat (and I mean that very, very literally). I have no problems with allowing a student to perform a procedure that he/she has never done before, as long as (a) the student has been briefed about the dangers and (b) the student is able to follow emergency instructions under duress -- if the student hesitates to wonder what went wrong, or if the student feels a personal affront at a snappy instruction (and thus, hesitates) then that is going to be a big problem. I am not willing to loose a perfectly good batch chemicals (one that will last for months) just because one student did not take the instructions seriously, and suddenly stopped and became gloomy as soon as I told her to stop and to get out of the fume hood (the place where we put our hands, to work with dangerous materials). Nor am I willing to compromise a student's personal safety just because she is not willing to take the risks seriously -- now that I think about it, I wonder why she, as a professional model, is not concerned that her mishandling my chemicals could burn her skin.

I know I can be very rough when it comes to enforcing rules about safety (personal, as well as the equipments' -- and I would rather cut off a students' access to equipment, rather than allow a careless one to handle them, for those things are the tools that I will use to write my thesis, and the professors have placed them under my responsibility; not to mention, I wish to train my successor to use some of them when I graduate).  I have no qualms about screaming and yelling if I see my student in any sort of danger. Sometimes, I act much like a paintball referee, in this regard. Personally, I think I have a severe disdain for fearless people -- happy go lucky people, if you will. I cannot stand it when people do dangerous things without acknowledging the risks. I mean, if a guy wants to jump off a building, the least he should do is come equipped with a proper parachute which he has ample training with. Any idiot can jump off a cliff, but it takes a smart idiot to make it repeatable. I hate it when people act like dumb idiots [my definition of idiot: someone who does it because it feels good; someone who follows the 'id' -- so, technically, all scientists and engineers are very systematic idiots]! I once went skiing with a friend who did not pay much attention to the risks, and nearly got himself, and a little boy, killed while skiing backwards (care free) into the trees. Personally, when I take a friend out, somewhere, I want to bring this person back alive and kicking -- not in a body bag. I'm not sure, but maybe after watching my friend have repeated near misses that evening I developed an extreme intolerance for people disregarding risks (of course, I had been shot with an air rifle when I was a child -- and I did not think I would survive -- so that intolerance could have originated there, only to be bolstered by my skiing experience). So, perhaps it takes very little to set off my short fuse, when it comes to keeping within certain parameters of physical safety -- not that I am in any way keen to change that behavior, but this does add another layer, bolstering my image of being what my colleague called a "hard ass."

So, I am still wondering exactly what kind of a person I will become. I sometimes feel that I am like the old fashioned teacher who greets the student with a tablet of instructions and says something along the lines of "These are the rules. You will learn them. You will live by them. Under my care you will learn the tools that you will need to survive, while you learn to infallibly follow every instruction, under my watchful eye." In fact, when one of my students flouted one of the rules of laser safety I just burst out: "(You know) the rules. You will live by them. You will die for them." Well, I guess I finally let out how I feel about it, for myself. I actually use my personal rules for safety in extreme sports when I work in the lab. I think it works out beautifully -- until someone starts pretending that the risks are not there; and at that point I become anything but friendly.

Do I think that there is room for being friendly? ABSOLUTELY! Just, that it is very important to remember that an instructor is in charge of getting people ready to do certain tasks (be they doing stoichiometry, or aligning laser beams), and letting a passive attitude get in the way is tantamount to failing that friend that one is training. Under most cases, that student that one has failed becomes someone else's problem; but in some cases that student whom one has wronged becomes one's own problem. So, while it may be okay to add a student to one's Facebook, or other social networks (though I refrained from that until the very end of the semester), and (after discussions with the relevant professor) it may be okay to invite students for skiing trips (which I have done), I don't think being a friend amounts to being lenient. Personally, the more I consider a student a friend, the more I want to treat that student the way I treat myself: I become more and more demanding of them (perhaps my optics lab's instructor's attitudes rubbed off on me, as he was a friend, and he rode me very hard, and given how useful I find the things that he taught me, I truly admire his attitude). In fact, when I got the two undergraduate lab course students (some months back) with whom I had the most fun, I personally asked the professor if I could torture my friends (they were my friends since before that class, so I felt free to do whatever I wanted with them) -- and I ended up having a lot of fun churning their brains, since the professor said "Yes!"