50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 25
Not every instructor is well remembered, or was well-suited to instruction at the Naval Academy. This one wasn’t, and he’s stayed with me for reasons that have nothing to do with fondness.
Every midshipman, regardless of major, was trained in the math and science required of a shipboard engineer. That’s why, even as a political science major, I took enough of those courses to earn a Bachelor of Science rather than a Bachelor of Arts. That’s also how I ended up in LCDR C’s fluids course. Fluid mechanics is a core engineering and physics discipline that deals with how liquids and gases behave at rest or in motion, the kind of thing that underlies weather, aerodynamics, and piping systems. Foundational, in other words. Everyone in our fluids class had a D or an F, except the one physics major, who had an A.
There were versions of these engineering courses for the “poets” and for the engineers. Poets got the formulas and solved the problem; these courses were known as “plug and chug.” Engineers had to derive the formulas first. I was a poet as a political science major, but it didn’t seem to matter which track you were enrolled in. In LCDR C.’s fluids for poets class, the tests never looked like the homework.
After repeated efforts at understanding the material got me nowhere, I turned to my father for help, a USNA grad himself, department chair of math and science at USNA back in the 60’s, retired chair of mechanical engineering at Catholic University. Fair to say a man who knew how to teach. With course outlines, textbooks, and problem sets in hand, He tutored me himself. I still failed.
Failing meant restricted weekends, no liberty. So I went to LCDR C. to tell him I’d been tutored and still couldn’t pass, half-hoping he’d recognize it as his failure to teach, not mine to learn. He said he guessed my tutor didn’t know what he was talking about. I was livid.
That was it. I made an appointment with the department head, presented my case, and tried to reason that this wasn’t just a matter of being dense or skipping the homework. I reported him for failure to teach.
I wasn’t the only one in class frustrated by his methods. One day, a classmate raised his hand mid-lecture and asked him, straight out, whether he’d had other orders he could have taken instead of a teaching post at USNA. Yes, he said he could have gone to Pensacola to be a flight instructor. My classmate asked if he’d ever reconsidered. We all stifled a laugh, half-stunned by the audacity, half-grateful someone had finally said it, the overflow of too many weekends spent studying to no avail.
LCDR C also had a combover and, by all appearances, no love life to speak of, which did not help his standing with a roomful of nineteen-year-olds.
Five years later, serving my commission in the Navy, I was an administrative officer at a helicopter squadron on North Island, Coronado, nearly done with my tour, when a set of orders came through the office. Lo and behold, it was LCDR C.’s name on them. Burning with curiosity, I went around the wardroom asking if anyone knew him or had served with him. One officer did. Told me, unprompted, that LCDR C. had a reputation for being difficult to be around, a real jerk.
The moment was revelatory and a confirmation. The time in fluids wasn’t a gender gap. It wasn’t just an instructor-student mismatch. It wasn’t just us, the mids. It was him. He was consistent with us, and sadly, his reputation had followed him from the fleet to the Naval Academy and back.