Searching for Excellence

Where is the drive for excellence?

Today, I read an article that disturbed me. The article told of a congressional inquiry into an Air Force incident in which 17 officers were relieved of duty as launch officers in our nuclear fleet of missiles. The reasons given were that they were new to the service and had not yet learned how important this job was. The officers involved could not do their jobs correctly during an inspection. The commander of the unit where these officers were assigned did the right thing, he relieved them of duty until they could prove that they were ready for the job. What went through my mind was why those officers were not driven, themselves, to do the best job possible. Failing to do that job correctly could have huge consequences. Clearly, something was wrong, and that is why the inquiry was going on.

When I was assigned to Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Omaha, NE, I supervised a group of engineers who produced the programs we loaded into those nuclear missiles to control them as they flew their missions. I used to lie in bed at night amazed that I had been given that responsibility. If we screwed up, and our missiles were launched, we might not win the war. We all prayed that our programs never actually got tested for real, and, thank God, they never were! But the defense of the United States of America depended in large part on the work we did, and we all knew that. We all took that responsibility very seriously.

Excellence in what we did was not a goal. It was the minimum acceptable requirement, not something we hoped we could reach. It was something we had to reach!

It seems that we are facing a problem these days. Young folks do not seem to have the same drive to be excellent at what they do the way us old folks had. Probably every generation has said this about the next generation, so it must be my turn. I know many will disagree with this, and there are plenty of examples of young professionals doing outstanding jobs. But I see far too many examples where young folks feel that doing the minimum needed to get by is perfectly fine with them! Excellence is not something they worry about.

That bothers me a lot!

Students

I teach computer programming courses. In far too many of those classes, I run into students who will only do exactly what you tell them to do. Why do more, they ask. Then they expect to get an "A" on their work. Should that be the reward for minimally acceptable work?

In the article I read, there was a comment from General Welch, Air Force Chief of Staff that went like this:

"There was more of an attitude problem than a proficiency problem,” Welsh said. ... “They [the commanders] took very aggressive action early to make sure that there was no question in the minds of their crew force that marginal behavior or sort of satisfactory just above the line was not acceptable."

A student who does the minimum "just above the line" work is cheating himself or herself out of the education they most likely will need to do well in their careers. I tell students that their job, while in school, is to learn as much as they can, to become as proficient as they can, to become competitive in the job market. It is a sad fact of life that jobs are not sitting there waiting for them when they finish school, they will have to prove themselves better than the next applicant. If they succeed in getting a job, they then have to keep that job by being better than the person working next to them. Sadly, this will come as a shock to quite a few of those folks who are only willing to do that minimum level of work!

We live in a "copy and paste" world these days. I put up fairly detailed code examples in my lecture notes, and I see students copy that code and paste it into an editor. They run the code and it works. Wonderful! They move on to something else. Did they learn anything doing that? Hardly!

(I sometimes find mistakes in my code. I will hear students complaining about how bad my notes are in those cases. I have tried telling them those mistakes are there on purpose, to keep them from doing the "copy and paste" dance. Do they try to fix the broken code. Some do, but some do not. Sad.)

When I went back to school the last time, to get another Master's degree in Computer Science, I never copied and pasted any code I found. I forced myself to type it in using a good programmer's editor. By doing that, I actually read the program code and thought about what was going on. When I got it running, I played with it and experimented with my own ideas. In the end I learned something useful. That, to me, is a much more valuable way to play with an example program. It seems I can barely convince students to read the notes sometimes, and only the best students will do more than just what I require them to do!

Looking for answers

I am on the prowl for ideas about how to fix this lack of drive for excellence. Part of the solution has to happen very early in the lives of our children. I had a ball giving a talk to a bunch of third graders, telling then how I became a rocket scientist. After that talk, the teachers said those kids were building and launching rockets in the school yard for weeks. That is exactly the result I was hoping for.

My classes today involve robots. Not the kind that you see on television blowing each other up, but the kind you have to work on to make them do anything! It is hard work, but in the end, it is a lot of fun.

I am working on a web site to support a project I hope to get off the ground soon. I want to put together a robot lab I can wheel up to a middle school and let kids play with my robot equipment. Maybe I will try to get a grant to help do this. Otherwise, an SUV full of robot parts will be wandering around Austin soon.

In my classes, I am looking for ways to get students to write more code and actually read the lecture material more. Giving them more work to do also generates more grading work, so perhaps a system that automates part of this grading is in order. Hey, that sounds like a project that could be fun!

What do we do about this?

This blog is my attempt to tell my story, and I hope that my story helps inspire and motivate my students to find something that drives them to pursue excellence. For me, it was a passion for learning how airplanes flew. I know that seems silly to some folks, but it was the spark that sent me off on a life adventure of discovery. Wanting to learn how that airplane managed to hang there in the sky led me to learn about aerodynamics, structures, propulsion systems, control systems, stability issues, and eventually computers. What happened to me then was unexpected.

My life long passion for aviation mutated into a passion for understanding how computers work. That was actually more fun than I expected, and as I got better and better at working with computers, my career path moved over into computer science. I am still a huge fan of all things about aviation, but I am an equal fan of all things about computers.

Why are our young folks not more interested in something that will lead hem into a fulfilling career? Why are they not more curious about their world. They have access to far more information today than we had access to in out entire lives. That is a good thing and a bad ting. I tell my students "You have questions, Google has answers". That is true, but why are the really interesting questions missing. Many are too busy making sure all their "friends" on Facebook know exactly where they are and what they are doing at every waking moment of the day. Why this is necessary has always been a mystery to me. Do we really need that much information?

Hopefully my students will find their spark, that one thing that drives them to be the best they can be at something. All I can do is try to help them do that!

Anyone reading this is welcome to post their ideas on how to inject more drive" into our students. Use the comment area at the bottom of this post.