Lesson 19
5 January
1.6 hours
 

N68608 today--one of my least favorite Cessna 152's because it requires a lot of attention to the rudder.  Adam doesn't like it, either.

Clear, with a crosswind of 5 knits, or so.  The air got a bit bumpier while were up, but it wasn't really blustery.  Some puffy cumulus clouds blew in at about 4,000 feet. The temp was 66F.

We did a lot of steep turns, slow flight, turns around a point, an emergency landing simulation, and some S-turns along a road. And one landing with a bit of crosswind, which I did pretty well, except for flaring out too high and "landing" about 5 feet off the ground.

In all of today's maneuvers, I did parts well, but as wholes the maneuvers were ragged. I knew that I was learning a  lot, but Imagine Adam probably thought I was having an off day.

That brings me to another thing about learning-teaching:  Some people appear to learn best by practicing and mastering one thing at a time--or, at least, that's how they THINK they learn best.  They also seem generally to assume that everyone else ought to learn best that way, too.

I (I'm the exemplar here because I'm the only student I know inside out) don't seem able to learn well in that fashion.  I seem instead to learn everything all at once.  That is, I seem to learn on all fronts at once.  That's not too surprising, because I seem to THINK that way, too--"holistically" is one of the popular labels for it.

Also, I've never been good at precision, which probably also goes with the "holistic" thinking.  One of the things that I have trouble with in flying is doing maneuvers precisely and consistently.  I can DO them, all right, and I keep improving; but probably not always in ways that are immediately obvious to an instructor or an examiner.  Fortunately, Adam is patient and doesn't seem to be a real stickler for details, even though he naturally wants me to be precise.

I'm not sure right now how to apply this to teaching or learning in other situation, but it's certainly another thing to keep in mind.
 

Back to "Learning Flying"
My home page.