Speechless

My last class of the day at North Texas State back in 1972 was "Speech Communications". It didn't start until an hour or two after my French class ended so I had some time to kill - and when I wasn't hanging out with the Cajun woman from French class I would head over to the student union and shoot the breeze with a couple of Vietnam vets (Marines) I had met there.

Aside - It was during one of those talks that I first heard about "fragging" but that didn't bother me nearly as much as one particular "friendly fire" story. Here it is:
One of the guys had served with a Marine Recon unit that was operating out of an army base along the DMZ. His unit would go on patrol for days at a time (LRRP) and when they got back the army sentries (who were supposed to do a password challenge) would see movement outside the perimeter and open fire on them... The Marines reported it to the base commander (repeatedly) but it kept happening. So one day they returned fire, killing 2 and wounding 3...
The guy who told the story really didn't really have any remorse about it. Obviously it was regrettable, but they were tired of getting shot at every time they returned to base... No charges were brought and it should come as no surprise that the sentries never opened fire on them again.
BTW: He was the guy who told me that unless I had served in the military I didn't get to pass judgment on those who had... I realized he was probably right, and that was one of the reasons I eventually joined... But I'm drifting way off topic here :-)

When I showed up for Speech class on the first day of the semester I was (pleasantly) surprised to discover that the teacher was a 21 year old 6 foot tall redhead with a "brick house" body... (She wasn't a "full-on ginger" - her hair was more of a dark copper color and she had brown eyes - but I wasn't complaining.)
Now - some of you are probably thinking "Isn't 21 a bit young to be a grad student?" And the answer is that she wasn't a grad student, she was a junior... As she explained it, they normally wouldn't let an undergrad teach classes but she was just that freaking good... Yeah - I don't think the word "modesty" was in her vocabulary :-)

So - on the first day of class she explained that she always wore a scarf because her neck would turn bright red when she was embarrassed or flustered, and that made sense... But she didn't explain why she sometimes wore insanely short dresses... I mean - it was OK if she was standing still with her arms at her sides, but the second she raised her arm to write on the board or leaned the slightest bit one direction or the other it got a bit distracting.

I figured it had to be deliberate because she was always going on about being ultra-conscious of your appearance, telling us that everything about you communicates something to everyone around you... I was tempted to ask her what it meant when a woman repeatedly flashed her crotch at a room full of people, but I didn't think she would have taken it in the spirit intended :-)
And it was even worse when she was handing out papers. For some reason she wouldn't just pass them down the rows. She insisted on walking around the room and personally placing the papers on each desk while making eye contact... I think it was supposed to teach us something about communication, but all it taught me was that when a 6 foot tall woman wearing a dress that's too short leans over to put something on the desk across from yours her butt cheeks end up about 18 inches from your face... It is a lesson I have never forgotten :-)

But you may be surprised to know that her ass is not the only thing I remember from that class... And that leads to one of my favorite stories:

One day the teacher set up an experiment that was supposed to demonstrate that you can't communicate effectively without face to face interaction... It was quite simple. She had placed two desks (facing opposite directions) at the front of the room, and on each desk was the same set of 7 blocks (all different shapes and colors). The idea was to pick two students (A and B) and have student A arrange the blocks on his (or her) desk in a manner of his (or her) choosing, then describe the arrangement to B so that B could replicate it with the blocks on his (or her) desk. The key was that B was not allowed to ask any questions - it was pure one-way communication. And the intended outcome was that B's arrangement would not look anything like A's, thus proving the teacher's point.

That's when the teacher made a huge mistake... Nobody volunteered, so she picked me and the engineering major (Mike) who sat behind me as the "guinea pigs"... Yeah - I honestly don't know what she was thinking...

Aside:
Most people who read this will probably know that I've spent most of my life writing software. But what you may not know is that I am roughly 10 times more productive than the average software developer... And I'm not alone. This a very well documented phenomenon. There are some people who are simply born with the ability to take a problem and quickly and accurately translate it into unambiguous step-by-step instructions in their head. In other words, we can literally think like a machine.
Of course, the vast majority of software developers are not wired that way. They can do the job, but not without a bunch of intermediate documents, diagrams and flowcharts. And that's why it takes them 10 times longer to do the same thing...
BTW: I really don't consider it to be a matter of "smarts". I prefer to think of it as a potentially useful birth defect that (at times) can be downright crippling :-)

But as Mike and I headed up to the front of the class I wasn't aware of my "gift" yet (just as the teacher wasn't aware that she had made a huge mistake)... And - long story short - I arranged my blocks, described it to Mike, and his arrangement was identical...
You should have seen the look on her face. She wore rather thick makeup (for the same reason she wore the scarf) but it wasn't enough. She was absolutely glowing red... All she could do was mutter something like "Uh...That's not supposed to happen..."

Now - at that point you'd think she would have picked two different students... But she didn't... She simply had Mike and I switch roles, and (surprise, surprise) the outcome was exactly the same...

Aside: There really aren't many people capable of nailing that experiment. Mike and I may be the only two she ever encountered in a classroom... And yet she somehow manged to chose us both out of a class of 40 students... Simply amazing...

For some reason she didn't seem nearly as shaken up by the second "failure" as the first... She simply sent me and Mike back to our desks and picked two other students... And despite the fact that Mike and I had just demonstrated "how it's done" (twice) the new duo managed to screw it up on the first block and it just kept getting worse from there... And the teacher was like: "See? ... That's what's supposed to happen!" and she even reran the experiment 2 or three more times with other students to reinforce the point.

You know - I have to admit that I did feel a bit bad for her... I mean, it was her first teaching assignment and she was trying so hard... Of course, I could have deliberately screwed up the experiment had I known it was supposed to fail... But she didn't tell us that up front - I guess it was supposed to be a surprise...
And it most certainly was :-)