Instructor Student Relationship
Hi Guys,
I'm not an instructor, I'm an old private pilot. Since 1958, I count that I must have flown with about 19 instructors - that I can remember. So I consider myself to be rather a connoiseur of instructors.
The individual relationship between a given flying instructor and a given student is very special. Indeed, I consider the ability to manage this relationship to be really the most crucial element in the instructor's skill-set.
The result is with the same student and in identical circumstances, one good instructor may choose to encourage, while another good instructor, but a person of a different temperament, will be plainly and honestly critical.
However, both will be equally successful (or not as the case may be) with that student on that occasion. It just depends on how those two human beings relate to one another.
Yet, so far as I can see, this relationship seems to receive very little if any attention in the instructor training or selection processes. The result is that some do it well and some do it poorly. Those who do it well are often just taken for granted by their employer and those who do it badly are almost never sorted out by club/FTO proprietors. The ability to manage this relationship gets to be looked upon as 'some kind of black art that some can do and some can not, but what does it matter either way'? Yet it is easy to discern who are the good instructors, who do connect well with their students, as they quickly develop a devoted following among the students.
To be any good, you have to commence by wanting to instruct and thus wanting to enter into and manage this relationship. If you don't really want to instruct, you will never really 'connect' with the student and you will thus never be more than mediocre. Perhaps this is because to acquire this skill requires emotional maturity, something that only comes with time. I find that as a result most career instructors are pretty good, while the 'hours-builders' can be a very mixed bag. Some of these, right from day one, already have an inate emotional maturity perhaps beyond their years, others do not.
So while these little rules of guidance like, 'always finish on a positive note' are a useful starting point for the tyro instructor, I feel that as the instructor builds experience, he/she should not be afraid to depart from these rules and gradually operate on gut feeling. But this takes time to learn.
Broomstick.