I wanted to give a quick update of where I am at with flying. Unfortunately I have not been able to go flying recently. The weather has been everywhere lately. From snow, freezing rain, and the lovely winter overcast layer, it has been a time for much patience. But, I’ve found a way to occupy myself while making sure that I am doing something aviation related.
It’s called: 5 minutes a day. In high school my brothers always told me, it’s only five minutes a day. They were talking about SAT practice. They got high scores and told me that they credited it to consistent and every day practice. Their rule was that no matter what, they would study everyday for at least 5 minutes. Some days it would only be 5 minutes and others it would be a lot more, but they were still improving every single day. While I’m not flying, it would be silly to think that I still cannot improve at it just because I’m not in the air. So, I’m trying to implement that 5 minutes a day rule. Whether that’s reviewing emergency procedures, practicing comms, reading maps and weather, I’m still trying to learn and retain information.
For the future I recently scheduled many flights for February, so I am really looking forward to getting back in the air.
Here are some quotes on my mind as we head into the new year.
“Don’t practice until it’s right, practice until you can’t get it wrong.”
Similarly, “practice until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.” -Angela Duckworth
For full understanding, I think it’s true that you cannot do a task correctly just once and have complete mastery. This can be applied from anything like math problems to specific music rhythms. Just because you have gotten something right in the past does not mean whatsoever that you will be right when it comes time to show off your skills – whether that be through a performance, test, or teaching it to others. A fuller sense of mastery is when you are completely surprised that you have gotten it wrong because you practiced it so many times. I have really seen this concept in music before with really hard passages. Where you practice a passage so many different times, from so many different angles that when you perform it, even if you are super nervous, you play it perfectly, not only because of muscle memory, but because it is so ingrained inside of you. I think that applies to flying too, that when you practice something like emergency procedures so many times, if it actually comes up and you are freaking out a little bit, you automatically take control of the situation.
“Life is the ultimate open-note exam”
In this same vein, I don’t think we should be focused on just learning things until the test. Because now that I get to study what I want, I’ve realized that in real life, everything I’m learning matters and can be applied, whether it happens to be on a test I take or not. That is another reason to strive for mastery beyond the bare bones. In a related thought, we don’t only have to learn things that are going to be on a test, sometimes it’s just nice to know things that you are interested in. An example of this is knowing “the why” behind something so you have a deeper understanding.
“It was neither necessary or possible to educate people who never questioned anything.” -Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Several times, even in the past day, I’ve had a teacher ask a question to the class, and the class stays dead silent and doesn’t not answer. Sometimes the question is rather easy, and sometimes I’m sure that none of us know the answer. I think that it is all about going out on a limb and guessing the answer to the best of your ability. Sure, sometimes you are wrong, but there is nothing wrong with that as long as you are learning how to do it right. I am growing in the sense that within the right contexts, I’m learning that there is absolutely no harm in getting something wrong. Oftentimes in practice problems for classes I find myself taking up whole pages for a single problem. I let myself do that, because I try the problem with different angles until it clicks, and I think that is part of the learning process.
I often feel this sense that I’m holding back questions in the recess of my brain, whether it’s for class or flying. That in a sense as we’ve grown up, after asking a million times why the sky is blue, we are taught to keep the questions to ourselves. And pretty soon, after a while, we just stop wondering all together – we stop asking the questions. But if we don’t have the questions, if we don’t have the curiosity, there is no point in learning something in the first place because we don’t really have a need for it. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve realized that I need to bring back the questions, no matter how silly they may seem to be. I think that opens up a whole world of possibilities. Because
“there was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.” -Catch-22, Joseph Heller
A penny for your thoughts?
-Jovie
