Choose your words wisely during the oral. I remember teaching the examiner something and I said something that was "off" and he asked what I meant by that and I just sat there saying "uhhhhh"
. You got this. Have you practiced teaching someone not involved in aviation? I practiced on my mom, who is a teacher so she was able to help me with some things. She had no aviation background and I taught her some of my lesson plans. It was good because she didn't understand some points so it made me think about changing how I taught the subject or explaining it a different a way.
Luckily I have a background in teaching technical concepts to non-techies. Part of a former job. Both while they were OTJ and in front of a classroom. For years.
I know to dumb down tech jargon into English equivalents and simplify and do it while drawing on a white board, and watching for that sideways glazed look when someone doesn't get it when described that way.
Aviation like tech is horrible about that. "Pitch up" doesn't make any sense to a newbie. Neither does "raise your angle of attack".
"Pull on the yoke until right about there... okay hold your hand up like this... notice how many fingers the nose of the airplane appears to be below the horizon. Now glance at your airspeed indicator. What does it read? Pretty close to that Vx number we calculated in the office earlier? Cool. A little fast? Okay what do we do to climb more and slow down a little? Pull a little more. Nice. Okay note where that is in the window. In this airplane with normal takeoff power that view won't change much."
I know you know this, just iterating it for folks reading along. Jargon doesn't work. Not until you can relate jargon to something more basic.
CFI also says I don't appear to have any trouble teaching while doing this in the airplane. We'll know more over the next few days but I don't feel uncomfortable talking through something coming up while flying the airplane or monitoring someone flying. I know that's a big hurdle for many, including some friends who've taken this ride.
My problem is that since I can "make up" terminology to get a point across, that I have to be careful to use the book terminology and start there and add to it, and loop back around and restate it the book way after I see that the light bulb goes on.
Lesson plans, written FAA docs and aids (just have the dang AFH out and the thing open to the right page), visual aids, and what not, make that part not so hard as long as I don't forget to use them.
In fact, if anything I want to throw the FOI and Instructor book at whoever wrote them. They're out of date for modern adult teaching methods but I can cope and speak in their screwed up 70s versions of adult learning methods (some of which are correct and some, like their mention of the damned Meyers-Briggs are just so broken someone should tear out those pages and light them on fire in a campfire at OSH), so that's just the "Here's what some misguided psychologist wrote for the FAA in the 70s..." and memorization of the out of date goofiness.
If you buy fully into all of that FOI psycho-babble, you'd believe that you're "self-actualizing" every time you take a dump in a toilet because your folks knew Maslow's hierarchy and withheld dinner every time you pooped your pampers until they motivated you to poop on the pot. LOL.
(Yeah I know Maslow and Meyers-Briggs, and can speak to them. And I know to be nice in case an examiner likes them. But they're busted in a number of ways. And have been for decades. They work for some and not for others.)
I have some strong feelings about adult training methods and Maslow and Meyers-Briggs are tools but often just flat wrong about the "Why?" parts of why we learn to do things. And FAA avoids an important one that we've ALL had happen because it's not PC... the wielding of the clue-bat.
Who hasn't had an instructor at some point in their training say, "Seriously. Look at me. If you keep doing that, it is going to KILL you. Stop it. Now... let's review how to do that skill correctly and let's go do it that way."
Totally ignored in the FOI but some people need a come-hither-so-I-can-mentally-slap-you moment. They're not struggling with self-actualization, or being a damned INTJ... they're struggling with paying freaking attention to what's important. Heh.
(One of my teaching mentors threw a dry erase marker across a classroom and pegged a guy in the chest once to get his, and the entire classroom's attention. It worked. And we never forgot that day's lesson. Of course we all needed the certification he was teaching to keep our jobs, so the motivations were a bit different than someone paying you to teach them something optional in their life, but I know you get what I'm saying. No, I won't be allowed to throw things at flight students! Haha... well maybe the ones that have a sense of humor, but good luck always getting that one right...)
So yeah. I'm fully expecting the "I don't get what you're saying" stare from the examiner. And real students. It's just going to happen and you have to roll into a different way to teach the same topic. And the idea that you need to get them to say back to you what they think they were just taught, to see if they can articulate it and also to look for hints that they missed some piece of it.
I've been told I was always the student who needed to think about it and come up with my own way of phrasing it first, then get corrected on it where it wasn't quite right, and along that path I'd pick up the correct terminology. One of those weirdos who liked that Wolfgang Langwiesche called the elevator "flippers". LOL.
Angle of attack is a bear until you tell some people to go stick their hand out of their car window on the way home.
