Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Flight Instruction First Thoughts

I think that to be a teacher, one of your inherent motivations should be the desire to teach. To search for the means and methods to instill new knowledge onto your students. I know everyone’s heard the start of this rant before. But here’s the twist. I am complaining about myself. I call myself a teacher in the strictest sense because I interact one on one with my students to teach them how to fly. I spent a few thousand for the knowledge and skill needed to become a flight instructor. But now that I am one, I find that any desire I had to teach people to fly has been eaten by the demoralizing bureaucracy and endless paperwork of a government institution. Disastrous Ohio weather also has its part to play. My students don’t make any progress. They are pretty lazy, especially when I remember the effort I put in to flying when I was in their place. They don’t study, they don’t make an effort to fly when they can, and it comes down on me as the instructor when they do not do well. It’s my reputation that they are risking as well as their own, and for that I have to find extra ways to supplement their learning. This equals more work for me, which as a general rule I am opposed to. Through all the pain and suffering I find myself asking where is the desire and devotion as a teacher that I am supposed to have? I think it disappeared when I went to Dallas and felt closer to my career then I do now. I feel that flight instruction is a step backwards although I was not even flying in Dallas. It’s something that I do only to return to that which impressed me so. I hope that in the days to come I will find something that will return the joy of flight instruction to me. Or maybe it’s just been a bad couple of days.

Posted by eclipse on 11/01 at 11:39 PM
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Whenever I ask you questions about flying, which is often, you always have some clever example of how I can relate it to my own life. I know that you always try your hardest to get people to understand and I don’t think that it’s your fault that your students aren’t doing well. I think that it is unfortunate that you got stuck with people that lack motivation. I’m sure that any teacher has been in a similar situation. How can they judge you when they know how students can be? It seems like a no win situation. Hopefully next semester you’ll get some better students and that the weather is better. I’m still waiting to go flying with you again cause I like it when you teach me about what you love to do. You can at least look forward to that, I hope.

Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2008  at  08:25 AM

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