I've never failed a student, but lots of student have failed my courses. They all fail themselves, through lack of preparation, motivation, desire or skills. I just do the paperwork.
Oh, that's lovely.
I really like that one; I'll have to steal it for myself.
I've been "taught by" people like you. People who make it a sport to see how many potentially good trainees they can wash out. People who don't give a rats tail for the skill or motivation of the student or the needs of the regiments who sent them to learn something as long as they can stroke their own ego by running a "hard" course.
The way you and your kind operate, the student is more focussed on surviving the instructors than assimilating the course content
Can I get an AMEN! Holy crap on a stick, you've just described my Phase3/Phase4 course in a dozen words.
That summer, I got loaded on a course designed for 30-odd people, but manned by only 5 students. The way this is supposed to work, the course covers crew commanding, patrol commanding (a two-car patrol) and then troop leading (a seven car recce troop) in various phases of war. For each element and phase, you get two practice traces where there are no consequences for failure (save corrective training) and then a confirmation trace that was your "final exam", for which there were consequences for failure (the usual progression of formal warning, review board, etc)
With a full complement of students, you'd be in the hot seat about once every four traces. In those other traces, you'd be backfilled into observer positions on callsigns commanded by other students. If you did something stupid, you could be corrected for it, but generally being in an observer seat meant you were under the radar for the moment. It was an opportunity to relax a little, and to observe the student who was in the hotseat under less stressful condidtions and (one hopes) learn from his mistakes.
But having only 5 students had a number of side effects:
1) Every single trace was assessed. If you hadn't yet passed your "hard" confirmation trace, there was no consequences for screwing up other than a lot of yelling, but once you passed the confirmation trace, every subsequent trace was also hard assessed - and failure was treated like failing your first confirmation trace with formal wanrings etc
2) Because there wasn't a lot of downtime shuffling kit around and crews around between traces as students changed positions (the instructors would rotate and that was about it) the number of traces that could be done per day went way up - at one point we were doing double the usual number of traces per day.
3) Because 5 cars is the practical minimum number one can do the troop leading traces with, the instructors couldn't actually kick anyone off course until the whole thing had been completed (although we didn't realize this at the time) Instead, potential training failures got the absolute maximum number of allowed failures per phase of war, and then "passed" their last possible chance so as to preserve the body for the next portion of the course.
Now, to further stir the mix, add the following:
1) Of the 5 students on course, three should have been training failures the first week. One of these students was a good guy who was just way out of his element and just not able to keep up, the other two were probably the most aggressively stupid people I have ever met in my entire life. Not just stupid, but AGGRESSIVELY stupid. Because of the nature of leadership courses emphasizing teamwork (as they should) it then fell to the two competant students to carry the whole course. Not only did we have to pass our own traces, we had to do our best to cover for the mistakes of our peers.
2) The Course WO was the living definition of the "instructor you have to survive". This man was the biggest, nastiest, meanest-spirited son of a bitch I have EVER met in my entire life. He hated EVERYBODY, but especially officers, and he did his level best to make every second of our training as miserable as he possibly could - and with great success. Some of the more junior instructors picked up on his example and duplicated his attitude; some of the more seasoned instructors did their best to take the edge off him (and if they were caught doing it, they felt the wrath too. At least two different instructors were threatened with having all their traces thrown out and retested becasue WO A$$hole thought they were being too easy on the students) The man is infamous; you should see some of the reactions I get when I mention his name in certain salty circles (Holy $hit, they let THAT nutcase run courses?!)
3) And finally, mix in that the Armoured Recce course is just naturally very difficult. There's a lot of ground to cover, a lot of different skills to master, and even under ideal conditions it's playing chess at 200 MPH with your hair on fire.
The end result was the highest level of stress that I have ever been subjected to in my entire life by a couple of orders of magnitude, and for an extended period of time. I lost over 30 lbs that summer, and it took me quite a while to "come down" and resume a normal life once the course ended. I still get all worked up just thinking about it.
But.... and I really hate to admit this, because it seems to validate WO Psycho's methods.... that course was my finest hour to date. I'll be goddammed if I (and the other "good guy", Ted Graham from the Elgins) didn't rise to the occasion and overcome all the stressors and obstacles that Psycho Boy threw our way. Like making sausage, it wasn't very pretty while it happened... but in the end, the two of us BEAT the sonofabitch and passed the course. And in the process, man, we were GOOD by the end of it. Talk about passing through the crucible....
Now, getting back to Haggis' first comment, about half that stress was self-inflicted. I remember catching hell for copying a GIP down wrong and then discovering (to my horror) that the troop hide for the next trace (that I was responsible for navigating to) was in the middle of a lake. I deserved every bit of the shit I caught for that one, because in the real world, that could have been fatally disasterous. Mea culpa.
But the other half was just random psycho bullshit that served no useful purpose except to perhaps motivate me to push harder to see his schemes and plans undone. It got kinda personal at one point... a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" deal.
So I'm having a hard time drawing a valid conclusion here. On the one hand, I never ever ever EVER would run a course that way, or would want to see a course run that way, and probably a half-dozen impressionable young instructors (and a further dozen impressional future instructors) went back to their units thinking that that was how one ran a course, and I shudder to think at what misery that outward-rippling example ultimately caused. But on the other hand, there's no denying that passing through that gauntlet made me a better soldier. If I can survive THAT, I can survive anything.
But as far as the toll of stress goes... by the end of the course, we were all wrecks. It was consumptive, and it took a while to recover from. Up to a point, the increased stress honed us that much sharper, but a line was crossed at some point and it switched over to survival mode. I couldn't have taken a whole lot more than I did.
So I guess to sum up:
1) A high level of stress can indeed produce better soldiers
2) But the stress must be purposefull, not stupid and arbitrary
3) And too much of it eventually turns damaging.
DG
