[originally posted 2012-09-16; re-posted 2014-01-30]
Motivating
I grew up in a small working-class town on Vancouver Island, and I will always be grateful to Louis Biczo, Lon Taylor, Walter Dowd, and Ken Douglas for letting me take their band, chemistry, French, and history classes a year or two before I was supposed to. I was exactly the kind of mouthy know-it-all that I don’t enjoy having in my own classes today, but they saw past my teenage bullshit and treated me like—well, not like an equal, but like someone worth investing some effort in. It was their willingness to give me a chance, as much as the excitement of not being bored to tears, that made me work my ass off for them. In a lot of ways, the supervised study projects I ran at U of Toronto for several years, and Software Carpentry itself, are my attempt to thank them.
Demotivating
I enrolled as an undergraduate at Queen’s University in Kingston in September of 1980. I had registered as a chemistry major, so I signed up for the five courses as everyone else: Chemistry, Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Computer Science, and Physics 105. I remember the number because it was famous for being the toughest course in first year science: as the prof said on the first day, half of the students who enrolled would transfer to Physics 102 (“you know, the one for biologists and geologists”) around the time of the first midterm, and another sizeable batch would leave at Christmas.
I loved it. Nothing I’d ever done, not even those earlier-than-usual classes in high school, was as intellectually exhilirating as seeing Newtonian mechanics built up, step by step, from first principles. I did pretty well on the assignments, but only got 68% on the midterm—the lowest grade I’d had in anything except shop class in my entire life. I got the course transfer form, filled it in, and then threw it in the garbage. Instead, I spent an hour and a half every day for the next two months working through physics problems, sometimes three or four dozen a night.
I went into the Christmas exam knowing that I knew how to do this. I was practically dancing when I walked out: I’d done all six questions in only an hour, which left me with another full hour to check and double-check my answers. My hard work had paid off, and I was proud of what I’d achieved. When I got my exam back in January, though, my mark was only 98%. I know what that sounds like: “only” 98%. But that missing 2% was the difference between perfect and not perfect, and I knew I’d answered all the questions correctly. And when I read through my paper, I had full marks on each question. Where had I gone wrong? The only clue was a small note on the front cover: “please see prof”.
So I went and spoke to the professor, who explained to me that yes, I had answered all the questions correctly, as had the girl standing beside me with the same cryptic note on her exam paper. However, one of the questions had said, “Assume that…”, and one of the students hadn’t: he’d actually worked out a proof for it. The prof felt he deserved to get a higher mark for doing so, and since the university’s rules didn’t allow grades over 100%, he’d taken two points off each of us instead.
I didn’t care about physics after that. I still went to class, and I wound up with a good grade, but my Christmas holiday plans of majoring in the subject evaporated right then and there. 2% on a mid-year exam had no measurable effect on our final grade in the course (as the prof pointed out to us both, obviously having thought through our likely objections beforehand), but that wasn’t the point. The point was, I had done everything he’d asked me to, and then he’d moved the goalposts and taken my perfect performance away from me.
Thirty-one years later, I wish that I’d confronted him and said, “This isn’t fair!” but I was only 18, and he was a prof, and, well, that’s not who I was back then. I don’t think he ever knew what effect he had on my choice of career, but I do know that I remembered that incident every time I sat down to grade students’ exams. I wasn’t always as conscientious as I could have been, but I’d like to think that I’ve never made a student feel the way that prof made me.