Fun with Students
 

Further to my did in the Supply thread, my summer at the Navy’s Navigation school included teaching an advanced navigation course. I had 4 students and they were all excellent, but definitely not riven with self doubt. They started getting a bit stroppy so I decided it was time to take them down a notch or two.

We had weekly 25 question progress test which were multiple choice with a bubble test sheet. They could then be easily marked with a master cover sheet with holes that lined up with the correct bubbles.

I rewrote the next weeks test so that “B” was the correct answer for every question. It was very entertaining watching the students start to doubt themselves as the number of B’s started to accumulate.

After that the students were a touch more respectful towards their instructor.

RAF Finningley Nav. School c. 1974, mid morning coffee break, where students and instructors mingled.
One instructor, a 'determined-to-remain just a Flying Officer', was heard to remark that the RAF was accepting outed homosexuals and had decided they would all best be in one unit.

"Where would that be?" asked an innocent.
"Here darling/ ducky/ dear, right here at Finningley" and stroked the stude's upper thigh.
Small hole in ceiling as stude disappeared upwards.
Sorry if I have told it before, and before, and before.

I never used multiple guess question papers when instructing. If a problem occurred in the air then the solution never appeared as an option - the student had to know it outright. (It didn't help teaching classified subjects either...the paper would be classified). I once docked a student one mark for just using his nickname at the top of the paper...he only got 99% and whinged for the next few days.

Nobody but nobody was ever up for 100% when I taught/ lectured/ harangued/ bored. Thus deducting one percent would lead to 98%. Nobody ever got that, either.

At the Puma sim we convinced one group of RAF students that due to notification of a nasty ear infection going around, not only did the communal headsets have to be sanitised before and after use (true), but hotel shower caps had to be worn as well. Later copied at the Chinook sim, too.

Difficult to keep a straight face when you see two heads with elasticated plastic bags bobbing about under their headsets whilst they were trying to deal with a serious emergency. :E

I taught at the aviation college of a mid-West US university in the late 90's. It became obvious that many students were cribbing during multiple-choice tests.. The next time I produced 3 sets of identical questions, but they were in a different order on each set, the set being discretely marked in one corner. Of course, many of the students failed miserably and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I just shrugged and said that was the way they came out of the computer - which was entirely true. No-one had noticed the discrete set annotation.

Well that says a lot about you really.

You will be shocked and appalled to learn contemporary training techniques negate some dinosaur doing their best to sap students morale and place the emphasis firmly on the instructor to facilitate student development and learning. The RAF actually ran an excellent Facilitators course, which was oversubscribed with applicants....which may give you a further clue.

Works remarkably well in fact and certainly when involving EBT / VLE techniques.

On the other hand, possibly your social diary possibly had plenty of empty dates given invites to end of course parties must have been rare.

To save you getting too apoplectic, I used to have similar, but "more direct and open " shall we say, "discussions " with former "colleagues ", not that they were, who were quite happy to churn out "Death by Powerpoint " as it saved them any involvement with something known as.....progress.

When I was 'let loose' teaching Tristar tech at Cranebank, I was rostered for a monthly tech refresher session. Nominated pilots turned up and sat at 'wired up' desks which had 'responder buttone to react to multi choice questions. Session started and one late arrival rushed in and took a seat. On the instructor's desk there were rows of lights indicating the selections made by the 'victims'. As we progressed, one such was slow to react and frequently wrong. Eventually I had to stop and ask if this chap was feeling OK. The problem was quickly sorted - he was a 747 student and in the wrong room !

A teacher I know once created a test that started with a bold line at the top stating 'Read the entire test before starting on any of the exercises'. The last line on the paper stated 'Once you have read this, you have completed the test, no need to do any of the exercises'. It kept the class busy for most of the morning...

Ah yes, mention of those "wired up" desks brings back memories...most especially the antics of some of the more helpful invigilators during some of the quizzes for some of the non- mandatory, non-regulatory stuff that the head shed deemed had to be done to bulk out the SEP day......

Teaching basic electrics to the young ladies and gents of the RAF, we come to Lenz's Law. There was always one student a bit asleep and bored, but the lesson was followed by a demonstration involving a 1 volt power supply and a nice big copper coil with an iron core fashioned into a horse shoe electromagnet with an iron keeper. When the power was applied, it took quit a bit of force to get the keeper off the magnet. While the students were demonstrating their strength, I would take the previously bored one to one side and suggest it would be a jolly jape for them to remove the crocodile clips from the supply while their mate was pulling on the magnet. If the asked about a shock, I would point out it was only a 1 volt supply, theatrically lick two fingers and put them across the terminals. Matey, being thus assured would wait for my signal and then pull off the clips. Tthis produced a rapidly collapsing field and a decent back emf. The resultant belt would give me a chance to reinforce the learning of Lenz's Law and also drive home the point that apparently innocent things can still bite.

Then one day, out of curiosity, I scoped the back emf, and decided not to do it any more.

Halton, Omani student arrive to learn to be engineers, prior to this they had a year or so in the USA learning English mainly from a techniclal point of view, so few were very good at conversing in the language.
During one of the first classes as the instructor was talking one of the Omani's was chatting at the back of the class, it turned out he was the one with half decent English and was having to translate for the rest of the course. This continued like this until the exams.
Exam day and papers were passed around, the Omani translates the question and then simultaneously they all tick a box... this continued until the exam was finished and was scored, everyone one of them had the same answers... I do not know what they did after that.
I know they were looking to send one home until it was found his family (poor) would be in disgrace and would have to pay back all of the USA / UK course costs entailed, so he scraped through.

Teaching a class of students from Zimbabwe, I ask a question and get a rambling reply in fractured English. Eventually, I give up and interrupt, telling him I do not understand his answer, "That's OK sir" he smiled, "I did not understand the question either!" Lovely guys, great fun to teach.

A very long, splenetic, unfair and incorrect deduction from scant evidence.

Play the topic not the person K and C.

It's funny, but every time I see the title of this thread the song 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' by 'The Police' springs to mind!!! := :O

When I went through St Athan on my course, there was a course of African PTI's going through, nice bunch of guys but we did see the funny side when we came in one day and they were practising the Javelin, they were not very good at it. In fact they were positively dangerous, we were safer down range of them as they were flying everywhere.

Sounds like an Omani ATC student, who managed to win the best student award, despite being able to barely speak English and regularly having an Airprox or two in the sim.

In the days when Powerpoint was spelt OHP, I went to RAF Newton for one of the very early courses on computer based training. It was interesting. it might even have involved an early BBC computer, but at the end, the presenter noted I was not overly impressed. I explained there was only one power socket in the classroom I usually used at Halton, and someone had fitted the roller board over it, so I could not plug in an OHP. let alone a computer.

I was once asked to help out for a few days at the Staff College war game simulator. My syndicate shows up on day one looking decidedly the worse for wear, so I asked what was up. It turned out the (late and unexpected) promotion of one of the students had just occurred. The class had “celebrated” at a local and notorious waterhole.

One remarked things were going fine “until the shooter girl showed up”

That became the go to excuse for the students for war game sim runs that didn’t go well. “So Sir, the battle was going really well….and then the shooter girl showed up! “