As a kid, Janet Ash listened to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, played Chopin nocturnes on the piano, read anything she could get her hands on.

The very crucible into which nerds are poured, you say? Yep. And Ash is proud of her lineage. Nerds, she insists, flock to her.

“I think I’m a bit of a nerd magnet,” Ash says.

So of course, in keeping with Ash’s geek bona fides, it only makes sense that as a girl, this 12-year, Green River Community College engineering instructor would have sported twin calculators on her belt, memorized trig tables, and dazzled her parents’ guests with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse — that is, when she wasn’t pushing up those thick glasses of hers, the ones with the tape in the middle?

Nope.

In fact, if the stereotype of the engineer ever does correspond to actual flesh-and-blood people, then this sunny, cheerful, wise, witty, energetic, empathetic, gregarious, easily-moved-to-laughter, human being is not it.

At the same time she knows her engineering stuff backward, forward, upside down, from every crazy angle. And she is one of the best of the best at teaching some that, ahem, might more closely correspond to that, er, uh, popular image of the engineer.

All it takes is a few seconds with her to realize that you’re talking to a remarkable person, doing precisely what she should be doing on this planet.

Perhaps tops among her many gifts is that of getting across to her students concepts of mind-bending computer programming complexity.

She does it so well that in 2008, 2009 and now 2012, former students nominated her as a University of Washington Inspirational Teacher. Every year, the UWs Computer Science and Engineering department asks its undergraduate students to nominate their most inspirational high school or community college teacher for the award.

Oleg Godunok, a UW undergraduate, was one of the students who nominated their former teacher this year.

“Defining and explicating both object-oriented and procedural programming in a succinct way, the computer science engineering instructor, Janet Ash, found it essential to get everyone affiliated in lectures and in class assignments and labs. From complexity, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism to collections such as binary trees, sets, and maps, the classes that I took with her were the highlight of my day,” Godunok said.

“Janet Ash was a really big influence in my decision to pursue a major in CSE,” said another former student, Xiaoxia Jia. “While at GRCC she was extremely helpful and showed me a lot of encouragement throughout my programming classes. The comfort I received from her made things much easier to learn.

“I don’t take a lot of ego from it because the kids in my class would be 4.0 students regardless of what I did, but it’s just cool to be appreciated,” Ash said. “One student once said, ‘I think you’re a great teacher, but I think you’re really a great person.”

Ash earned her master’s degrees in ceramic engineering, now called material science, from the U.W. in 1982.

“I got into it because I found it genuinely interesting, and I always liked chemistry,” Ash said. “The other thing — and this is the honest truth — is that that if I got into a field with a lot of men, I knew I’d get more money. I always was really big on security. I think child care is super important, but you don’t get the money in child care that you do in engineering because it doesn’t have a lot of men in it. That’s my opinion. I’m not afraid of it, and I know that if I’m not afraid of it, I should try to do it. But I loved materials.”

Teaching calls

She fell deeply in love with teaching at Tacoma Community College and at Highline.

“When I came here, Bob Christianson, an engineering teacher here for 35 years, said ‘I’d love to work with you,’ so that’s how I got here,” Ash said of her introduction to GRCC. “He’s a mechanical engineer, and a lot of the engineering courses here are mechanical courses, so I just taught some of the beginning courses. I thought I’d better learn computer science, too. So in 2000 I started studying computer science. I’m completely self taught. I know how to teach. I don’t think I’m a natural programmer, but I think it helps me teach because I remember learning everything that I taught myself.”

Ash’s teaching philosophy says a great deal about the inner workings of the person.

“I’ve taught for 20 years. Learning is really tough, and we personalize it when we don’t understand something, and think that when we get something right it’s easy, and when we don’t get something right, we think we’re stupid. We don’t understand that we learn from our mistakes. It’s really hard not to take that personally. I just look at people who get really beat up, and they think, ‘I can’t do it because I’m stupid.’ And they don’t realize that they can’t do it because it’s hard.

“My job as a teacher is to break it down, and to encourage people, because I really believe it’s the road you go on to learn something that’s the big deal. My students are all going to be hired to be problem solvers, and problem solvers know it’s not just about getting the answers right in a book. Life is like that, people are like that, shoes are like that, everything is a problem to solve. The best students I know come to class, do their homework, put a lot of time in, and they are happy.

“I walk around the class all the time, that’s my big thing,” Ash said. “Every student knows that I know every student. And I turn back homework the day after I get it, so I stay really late on the days I get homework. One great thing about teaching is I get to have a lot of international students, and it’s pretty cool to have a classroom that has native students, international students. International students can definitely show you how to work.”

Ash and her husband are the parents of five children.

Jeff McCauley, division chair, said Ash is “an absolute delight.”

“It’s a tough topic, it’s one of the most difficult hurdles for engineers and computer scientists and for engineering students,” McCauley said of teaching programming languages. “It’s one of the more difficult topics to teach anyway, and for her to be recognized for excellence in a topic that, frankly, is so very challenging for students I think is even more remarkable. It’s just plain old-fashioned hard work, and she is always prepared.”

Josh Clearman, Dean of GRCC’s Technology Division, said the nomination speaks worlds about Ash’s efforts and her skills.

“Talk about a dynamo,” Clearman said. “Janet demonstrates superior skills in teaching ability and technical expertise. The students and staff are grateful she is a part of the team.”