From when I was a student:
There'd been some hard landings over the previous two months in our training squadron. A few birds were sent to the depot to get unbent / skin patched. At the quarterly safety stand down, one of the students stood up and asked "What can we do to prevent these hard landings?"
From the back my night flying instructor (I recognized his voice) drawled out ...
"Flare!"
The room broke up, and even the XO was stifling the laughter.
One from my IP days:
Me to student: "Pulling the nose up on short final won't make you go higher, nor get back on profile. It will make you go slower and fall faster. When low, lead with power."
Student to me: "Won't that make me go faster?"
Me to student: "We'll live longer dealing with having more airspeed than with having too little."
Student: "But I've been having trouble with floating."
Me: "No approach is too bad, nor too good, to wave off. When you make a decision to wave off, it is not counted against you. I count it in your favor that you used your head, and we get to try again."
Student: "Oh, I thought a wave off meant I failed the landing."
My jaw about drops. (Where the hell did he hear that?)
Me: "You fail the landing if you hit the ground wrong, or you stall and we crash."
I pause.
"Let's go and do some high work, and we'll come back to the landing pattern in a bit."
We left the pattern.
-------------------------------------------------
I asked around the other IPs for the next few days trying to find out where he would have heard that about failing the landing, and which IP was putting that word out? Had a long talk with the Standardization Officer. I was both puzzled and worried.
Nobody was teaching this. Apparently, this was one of those rumors running around among some of the students, who were always trying to figure out how to get the best scores on each flight .... yikes! Memo went out from the Standardization Officer to all flight leaders to do a bit of rumor control.