Too tough on student?
Got a quick question for other instructors out there (and students if they've had instructors like me). I am a new CFI with about 4 primaries right now. I work full-time as an Air Traffic Controller/Airfield Manager for the Air Force and then head to the airport to instruct after work and on weekends. Therefore, I don't have a bunch of time available. With my first student, I attempted to teach groundschool concurrently with flying. He has progressed very well and is going to be more than prepared for his tests. However, my schedule of work, groundschool, flying, home, sleep, then wake up and do it again was just too taxing for me to continue to teach a full-up groundschool. My other students wanted to do groundschool online, and do their flight portion with me. I thought this was a great idea as it saved me from teaching groundschool full-time. A fellow part-time instructor said he requires all his students to take groundschool, test, and then begin training before he flies with them. I thought, "Great! Just fill in the blanks and tie in their ground training with flying." Nice in theory. What I found with my first "flight-training only" student is that he would complete the lessons (which I know teach the test, for the most part) and show up with little to no knowledge of the material. Understanding of aerodynamics, systems, etc. were all below-average. Now, I usually wouldn't expect a new student to understand all of these areas, but when the student has completed the groundschool portion, I would expect he/she would at least know a little bit about basic aerodynamics and things such as the various types of altitude, airspeed, etc (particularly after I told him the answers the lesson before and assigned him some short studies on certain subject areas). I felt as though I was wasting his time/money by having to teach him about all of these subject areas after he had already completed the "groundschool." He asked if he could just "learn as we go" and "fly the airplane first." I explained how each subject area was a building block to the next, and why knowing things like how the instruments worked (he wondered why he couldn't just know how to read them) were actually very important to the overall objective of learning to fly an airplane. After an additional hour of groundschool on his thrid lesson, he again failed to complete a thorough study of the subject areas I asked him to look over, and only knew a few "test" questions. I told him we weren't going to fly and asked him to go home and study specific areas before we were to fly...otherwise, we would be wasting his time and money. He wasn't too happy and, of course, I got dropped. I now wonder if I required too much of the student to understand these principles before flying. I know that there are basic standards to be met and that every student should not be an expected to meet these standards within the first month. However, I do like to build a certain amount of base knowledge upon which to build, and I realize that I sometimes do go a great deal into depth on some of the subject material. Has anyone else run into this problem? Was I a bit too demanding? How about the online groundschools - do these work with folks who may not be as motivated to study? Thanks for the advise and sorry for the long post.