I need a lot of practice or something. I've signed up for a number of days in a row, hoping consistency might help. Mike says he has time to do that. He started out today by saying we need to do something to get these sequences and concepts and answers down, if it means trying to do a different style of learning or whatever. That's pretty direct.
Along with rehashing today's maneuvers, my thoughts keep spinning off into teaching & learning.
I trust (with Mike's assurance) that I will learn to fly, and I actually expect that I will learn to do it very well. There's a possibility that I won't, but it's not the most likely. Is it going to take me longer than an 18-year-old kid? Probably.
The experience is making me a heckuva lot better teacher. Part of it is just the awareness that comes of being on the receiving end. Another part is being with a good teacher. Teachers spend entirely too much on their own. How often do we get to soak up another's expertise and technique? Piano lessons and choir are benefitting from this.
Mike's got a name for what he does, "progressive (something)", and he just keeps taking you thru things, talking all the time, showing, explaining, doing the part of that needs to be done from his side of the plane, while expecting that you will take over more and more of it all. (Remember the comparison of taking someone on the interstate to teach them how to stop a car? How else could it be done?)
There's never anything personally negative in any of the interaction. Things are right, or they are not right, or they are noticed or not noticed, but I don't hear irritation or frustration in Mike's voice. His constancy really helps me keep from being blocked by frustration and helps me just refocus or go for the mental reach or whatever it is, because I do not like being inept. Not at all.
Still, today he was pretty direct. ..."You HAVE TO be able to move fast, multitask, keep flying the plane, hold your altitude, get these directions, finish the job." "We just went thru the ground." "Don't touch that!," etc. etc.
I'm noticing:
Mimetic cognition --
procedural knowledge--maneuvers & routines
the everpresent checklists lists (a mimetic version of knowledge encoding)
constant generativity. Mike doesn't seem to get tired of pointing and touching THIS and THIS and THIS as he talks.
Philosophic cognition --
Jeppesen & FAA book, test, emphasis on a complex yet defined set of information that is not to be challenged but mastered. (Inhaled? Drowned in?)
So there are these TWO HUGE NEW sets of patterns going down--the DOING and the heaps of INFORMATION that come into play with each action. It's a real crunch of being between the rock of rote/ritual and the hard place of needing to do fast accurate evaluation and judgment.
For instance, Mike asked me a relatively simple procedural question "How do we set up a stall?" (something that I have read, practiced, thought about, put on flashcards), yet I found myself practially paralyzed and having no response to give, whether verbal or in action. If I were on the receiving end of that type of behavior, I doubt that any judgment I would make as to what it "meant" would be correct. What is going on there?
Probably similar to the concept of two sides of the brain. One side may have the answer, but if the other is overly dominant at the time, it may not have access to that answer. I think that is partially what is going on with me, but it's not L & R hemispheres that are competing. I think it's a tug-of-war betwen mimetic (esp. procedural) cognition vs. the philosophic cognitive level.
Since mythic cognition stands evolutionarily and developmentally between the two, is mythic cognition the go-between? the arbiter?
Can "Top Gun," "Fate is the Hunter," "Wind, Sand and Stars," and Jake Green of Jericho bridge the gap? Mike is usually surprised when I ask him to just show me something. I want him to run the procedure so I can see and feel it smoothly, capably, well done. Imitation is the substance of social patterns of value, and identification/admiration is the glue. Gotta have it--the Right Stuff.
............
Mike spent a year getting his private pilot license, back in high school, but it really all came together for him in his Instrument classes.
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