Why I’m a bad student

Bob is a great teacher and I’m a lousy student. Both in the air and in the classroom. Ground school was particularly traumatic for me. There are certain topics that have to be covered; I guess a basic core curriculum type of thing. Personally if it were me, I’d want to redesign the whole flow of the course and give the instructors some tips on teaching techniques and basic classroom management. But this isn’t about them; it’s about why I’m an appalling student. So here we go:

·         I don’t do half the reading I should – I actually got to the stage that if I read the flight training manual before the lesson it would make everything seem  so complicated that I had to stop before it completely overwhelmed me (that’s my excuse!)

·         My ego gets in the way of everything – I have a very high opinion of myself! Seriously though, there were physics errors in some of the slides and I had to call the instructor out on it. Probably didn’t make me too popular.

·         I manage to panic myself to the point of intellectual stupor. My mind stops functioning properly. This means I spend a large portion of our ground briefing time thinking “I can’t do this, I can’t do this” instead of listening about how to do it.

·         I can be quite passive sometimes. So it took me a while to realize that Bob won’t always do the things for me that he has been doing. One day I will have to make, listen to, interpret and respond to those radio calls all on my own!

·         I get hooked into the Macho bullshit that goes around ground school. There’s a lot of testosterone packed into a very small space. Now I’m used to being in a Male dominated environment and can usually give as good as I get. For some reason though, instead of ignoring the silly little boys, I start competing with them. This is not good. I lack the correct anatomy to successfully participate in the metaphorical “how high up the wall” contest.

·         I have no faith in my own abilities. I am very good at convincing myself that I am simply incapable of performing various tasks. At this very moment I’m convinced that Bob is just being polite and humoring me and that really he doesn’t see me ever getting my licence. Despite the fact I outright called him on this last lesson. I asked him if he ever, realistically saw a scenario whereby I could pass my flight test. His answer was a resounding yes.

I still don’t believe him L.