A Story...

I had been teaching the Integrated Tactical Warfare Data System, or ITWDS (pronounced eye-tawds), for a couple of years. I was assigned to teach the Systems Configuration, Software, and P- and Q-Languages, used to request information from the system. My students were, for the most part, Navy Data Processing Technicians (of various pay grades), a few Naval Officers, and members of the Marine Landing Force assigned to the USS Tarawa-class, general-purpose amphibious assault ships (LHA's 1 - 4). The classes seemed to alternate with mostly DP's in one class, Navy and Marine officers in another, and "ground-pounder" Marines in another.
The officers, and the DP's were kind of easy classes, often the students who were "way ahead" tutored classmates who struggled, and classes would often get ahead of schedule. These made for some seriously-long lunches (5 hours was the record), or as with the DP's, long hours in the lab. The LHA Training Staff was a dedicated, and highly professional teaching staff. Most had experience working with previous generations of the systems, I wasn't one of them, so they taught me. By the time we actually gave our first set of classes, I was a Subject Matter Expert, and had multi-media presentations (in 1975 technology), that were hailed by our Audio/Visual Department. They should know, they helped create it.
Marine classes, however, always presented some unique challenges. The concept itself, teaching Infantry and Gunnery Marines to operate and program computers, is just not logical, but once, or twice a year, we'd give it our best shot. We had Marines in all shapes and sizes, from a full-colonel to PFC. Many were field Marines, who were being given an assignment to an administrative post, all of the "gunnies" and "tops" were on those assignments. Occassionally, we'd get a PFC, or Lance Corporal fresh from Infantry Training, but mostly the Marines were Vets. One of the NCO's had been the recipiant of a Congressional Medal of Honor, for jumping on a fragmentation grenade, protecting the life of a colonel. It took something from him. He didn't like to talk about it, but I had recognized the sky-blue ribbon on his uniform, and had to ask, anyway. I promised not to ask again, if he would wear it on the last day of class, he did so as a favor to me.
It was during one of my Marine-dominated classes, that Fleet Combat Training Center, Pacific, held its annual Instructor-of-the-Year competition. I was ready, had all my materials ready; equipment on stand-by, so I was pretty confident that everything would go well. It actually started real well, I had put my name and the title of the lesson, as we learned in IT School, and in pretty large letters, "Be sure to reset your clocks on Sunday," as it was the end of Daylight Savings Time. I told a joke, pretty standard for me, and we set about aquainting my students with the data terminal display and keyboard.
We got through the scheduled 1-hour lesson in good time, and used the remaining few minutes for Q & A. One of the Marines asked about the Delete key, and in which direction did it erase. I stepped to the chalkboard, my back to it, and drew a short, horizontal line (my Daylight Savings warning still on the chalkboard), and told them to imagine that line was the cursor, and wanted to erase that character. "Depress the Delete key," I told him, "and the character above the cursor was erased (a swipe of an eraser made the character disappear), and the remaining text on that line would move one character to the left. Now the line would read..." I turned to the board for the first time, and noticed my "cursor" had been under the "L" in "clocks". "Be sure to reset your cocks on Sunday?"
The laughter was long, and loud. The Evaluators, the students, even the CO (who had stopped in, and stayed), laughed until the tears set in. "I swear," I told them, "I didn't plan that, it just sort of happened." The laughter started anew.
When it was done, the Evaluators critiqued my lesson, and no one, not even the CO, had anything bad to say about my presentation. I came in Second, to some "hotshot" Electronic Warfare geek in the Instructor Competition that year for E-5 Instructors. (Ring any bells, Ted?)