But I am also a student. And being a student of flight these past few years has made me a far more reflective teacher than any professional development workshop or course I have ever attended!!!
In particular, I am thinking about the impact of teacher expectation (as perceived by the student) on student learning.
The most recent part of my flight training has involved planning for and executing cross country flights, that is, longer flights encompassing 3 airports. The idea is that one pulls together one’s weather, navigation and radio skills into one, long, flight “exercise”. All the skills acquired in Ground School and during one’s flight training to this point come into play as one prepares charts and paper logs for this much-anticipated “flight to somewhere”!
It is an exercise that involves a considerable amount of math calculations, not my forte, to put it mildly. :-)
My flight instructor, an avid mathematician and a quick mental practitioner, does her best to hide her growing impatience at my laborious approach to calculating pressure altitude, wind correction and magnetic variation. What should be a relatively straight-forward 1.5-hour exercise for most accomplished student pilots can become a half day affair for me, and it is increasingly difficult for my instructor to hide her contempt of my rather obvious mental clumsiness.
I can’t remember the formula for calculating pressure altitude, I need frequent reminders for where to find weight and balance information in the POH, I need ongoing support with figuring out how much fuel is needed for each leg of the planned journey. And my instructor’s impatience with my stupidity does little to increase my performance.
It is well-documented that self-confidence impacts performance; it is no secret that a student’s perception of her teacher’s attitude towards her can have a significant impact on said self-confidence. And as I sit there on the verge of tears every week, trying to muster up the courage to once again attack the seemingly insurmountable cross-country planning sheet, while my excellect-pilot-and-pretty-decent-flight-instructor does her best to not-very-successfully hide her disdain for my slowness and stupidity, I can’t help but wonder how many of my own students I put off with my impatience in my Grade 3 classroom each day.
What seems so very obvious to me appears to be PhD-level work to many of the 8-year-olds I teach.
But then, like my flight instructor with me, I’ve had the benefit of multiple previous exposures to the material I am trying to drill into their little heads!!!
The maid Aibileen, in the movie “The Help”, tells her young charge Mae, “You is beautiful, you is smart, you is strong”. Perhaps what matters not so much as whether or not Mae is actually beautiful smart and strong, but that she perceives her caregiver, her idol, to think her so.
No matter where YOU are currently in your flight training, whether you are at the 6th hour of flight instruction, whether you have just finished your first solo, or whether you are preparing for the flight test, you are ahead of where you were in the beginning!!!
Just think of how far along you have come since that first fam flight so long (or even so recently) ago! You will succeed at this endeavour. You is SMART, you is... and don’t you forget it!