CFI-A Lesson 1

Today was the first of a scheduled 22 lessons for the Certified Flight Instructor - Airplane rating. Earlier this week, I went to accounting and paid for half the lessons. If all goes perfectly, I will fly for 22 hours and have ground briefs for 34 hours. And, with only 22 lessons at 3 a week, that should taked just over 7 weeks. That sounds far too quick to me, especially considering: A) My knowledge and confidence level at the moment (not at all at the instructor level), and B) the holidays coming up soon and my instructor's plans to be out of town. I'm thinking 10 weeks - minimum - is more realistic.

The first lesson is a review of the fundamentals of instruction. This was covered in the first week of ground school, and I even took an FAA exam on this subject. Regardless of all that, this subject, to me at least, is the most theoretical and unlearnable of any aviation subject. Now, if you know anything about this subject, or just learning in general, you'd say, "Well no wonder it is hard to learn, given your bad attitude towards it." That is probably true. But I didn't always have a bad attitude; the material is just hard to correlate in the brain. All I can do is memorize it, but then it doesn't stick and I have to go memorize it all again.

With that said, I went to my first lesson. My instructor grilled me on this stuff for two hours. I found that I have two distinct areas of knowledge. First, I can generally explain a given learning skill or memory concept and even give a decent example of where it would be used in a training environment, if you give my the skill/concept up front. But, if you ask me to list the 6/8/10 different skills/concepts/mechanisms, I draw a blank and spit out one or two. Other than coming up with silly acronyms for these lists, I'm not sure how to memorize them permanently.

I'm planning to make a list of examples for each and letting the examples correlate with the names and maybe that will be the glue that makes this stuff stick in my head. Wish me luck.

I mentioned the schedule of hours earlier. Well, I'm already an hour behind after this lesson because I need to go back to it again and prove that I know all this stuff.