So often today, children and older students are coddled into thinking that anything that they say or anything they do is worth a pat on the back. We have got to stop this culture of “you are okay and I am okay” otherwise we are going to be raising a generation or two of students who cannot bare to make a mistake or bare to finish a project on their own.
Can you imagine if Gordon Ramsay, of television’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, was your professor trying to teach you mathematics or physics in post-secondary school? You might turn out to be a miserable, sobbing mess at the side of the road in that case. He, in his own foul literal way of demonstrating how to solve a formula or prove a quantum theorem, would lay into any student who had not done his homework nor finished the latest term paper.
There would be no time nor energy spent on quivering students who had parents who were on the board of directors, or who came highly recommended by a church deacon. If you failed to complete a lab or a homework assignment, you might as well wait in the hallway and be the first to address the problem with him even if he didn’t care. He is there to teach the subject and to graduate students who know the curriculum inside out.
One by one, students who did not have good study or work skills, whose work ethic and attendance patterns were sketchy, would be shown the door. Get out and stay out! The handful who remained and survived a full year of his insufferable comments and humbling scoffs would be his favored few and he would gloat over those who had failed before you.
He would then send you off to a graduate school or to an amazing career, guaranteed that he had done his best to teach you all that he knew, and then he would start on a fresh batch of sophomores who had heard of his indignant ways and torturous methods. But they were there to learn and he was in for a battle.
If only all teachers could get across the subject matter in this same gruff manner! Or is that a good idea?