People who teach...

It's no wonder that I get bored in classes easily. Now, this isn't a self-righteous patting myself on the back, but I tend to compare instructors that I am supposed to be learning from, to people that know how to give good, concise, clear instruction on a subject. Believe me, I have had some good teachers and some not so good. I have had really bad ones as well. Today was one of the top of the worst.

The thing is that there is absolutely no excuse to be a bad instructor in the military. They require a school to learn to be in front of a class, they teach you how to talk and work on avoiding bad habits that distract students, they make you get up over and over to force you to learn not to look at the stinking board that has your slides...it's all there. The one thing that they can't overcome is lack of subject knowledge. That is what frustrated the fer-schnockers out of me today. I am not sure that this guy knows anything beyond his script and he spent so much time looking at his own power points that I am convinced he had not seen the material until today. BUT he said that he has been doing this or a while. Yikes.

This frustrates me because he seems to be a decent guy and as a result of today's debacle, I am afraid that he has totally jacked up his chances of being viewed as someone who knows what they are doing. There were several people in the class looking utterly lost because he was all over the place, consistently not finishing sentences and failing to answer questions. The topper was when he tried to talk about a subject off the cuff which he was totally unprepared to do (or was totally clueless about). It really was sad.

I know I have this thing about instructing. I have dorked it often enough in my early years that I am willing to be a bit more patient, but it makes me realize all the more what needs to happen before you have a class full of people looking at you.

I want to take this guy aside and encourage him to get someone else to do this until he is better! I know, I know...you only get better by doing. Yeah - true. BUT you do in small portions until you can do the whole thing. You don't take on an entire course of instruction and "umm" and "uhh" your way through it while people are getting lost and you are missing entire segments that are KEY to the future parts of the class!!! {pant gasp wheeze}

I AM breathing!!! Ok. Enough. I'll deal, but I hope this pulls through. I need the information that this class is supposed to put out and if I have to sit through a few weeks of this, I'm gonna have to shove a pencil in my ear.

That'll hurt.

{/rant}