A couple of hours later, I'm in the same 172, cranking around the pattern with my first ever primary student. I'm a little tired. I'm counting how many hours remain before I can go home and sit down to dinner with my wife. I'm amazed. Never before in my half century of life have I wanted my all-too-occasional days of flying to end. My voice is getting scratchy from all the talking I've been doing, explaining, asking questions, making suggestions, telling outright. Too much talking? I don't know. I'm not sure how to tell when it's all just noise to my students.
He's doing fairly well today. He hasn't soloed yet, but he's done two landings in a row without any lurches or plunges. It's mid-afternoon. I've been flying since 8:30 a.m. I realize that fatigue is making me slide into a passive role, looking for a little rest on this circuit. My body wants me to sit back and play the observant passenger. Not good, I tell myself, and I straighten up, take my arm from behind his seat and get my feet ready at the rudders and my hands secretly set to grab the yoke.
Sure enough, he blows this one, pumping and twisting the wheel as the runway numbers slide under the nose all because of one little gust from the side, inducing erratic headings and attitudes just before touchdown. It's a marvelous demonstration of pilot-induced turbulence. "Whoa!" I say out loud. "Where did all this flailing around come from, Fred?" The next time around, he does the same thing. He's lost it for the day. No soloing him for a while.
What's happening? I've read about stuff like this in the FAA's little boiled-down mini-course in graduate education theory called "Fundamentals of Instruction," which I considered a useless load of academic psychobabble when I was cramming for the knowledge test before I went off to a Florida school to become a 30-day wonder CFI at age 50. Now I'm beginning to realize all that education theory was about the things I'm up against here. Correlation and suppression, ego and self-concept, perceptions and insights, the laws of primacy and intensity.
This is all a new world for me even though I'm kind of an old geezer for a brand-new CFI. I've a measly 170 hours of "instruction given" under my belt, but I'm beginning to realize there are things about this way of life that I could easily loathe. It's very hard work: intense, demanding and ultimately exhausting-for me, anyway. Many students don't do their homework, which I can't understand. It's their time and money going down the drain. Wasn't the idea that they wanted to learn? Don't they know that it's not a passive process? I have great respect for the people, young and not so young, who do this CFI work full time, day in, day out. I'm just a part-timer, and its frustrations are very apparent to me.
