#217 Scolded by Tim Tucker over CFI Lesson Plan

All right, day 217 pinion coffee. This is day 217 coffee with Kenny and this member sent me a whole box of K cups. This is the guy I talked about in day 203. My first ground school member in 2012 the bot before the ground school was even live. When he saw that accidental video where I was cussing up a storm and act like a moron he and he emailed me and a friend said kenny, Kenny, I can't find the buy now button. Purchased before the button was even live on our site. When we went live 3-1-2012 he sent me coffee, regular coffee. And then on the video I said yeah, I have to get me a regular coffee maker. And he's like Kenny, here I'll just send you some K cups. Send me a whole frickin box. Check this out. 96 so I'm enjoying the pinon coffee. Thank you Michael. Thank you for being the first ground school customer purchasing 2-29-2012. How freaking awesome is that? Our members are freaking incredible. These stories are incredible. Absolutely amazing. I freaking love it. Back home from the big California trip. So I have a good question here about CFI lesson plans and I'm going to go ahead and read you the email so you get the background of the question. Hey Kenny, been following you since just after I got my private heli certification. Since then with the help of hogs, hell yeah. I've gotten my helicopter commercial and start flying tours shortly after. I've also gotten my fixed wing private instrument as well as AGI that's advanced ground instructor and instrument ground instructor. All of that would be a good lead into my helicopter cfi, especially the ground school teaching part. Awesome. Man you are such a great track here with all those ratings. That's awesome. You're gonna be so marketable. My helicopter CFI check right is the end of September which is good. He's got he, you know, about a month and a half. We're the middle of August, almost middle of August and I'm wondering what the best option for compiling a CFI lesson plan. I have all my ground lesson plans but was wondering if you have a generic helicopter CFI lesson plan available or for purchase or if not can you refer me to someplace? Just looking for something I got to use use as a starting point and tweak and make my own. Everything out here seems geared towards fixed wings. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Dan. Awesome. Thank you for your question Dan. That is a great question that we get quite often, right? And here's My answer, I do not offer any type of a CFI lesson plan. And I can tell you've already been checking online and I've heard basically the same thing from people. You know, most of them out there are for fixed wing. If anybody knows out there for a helicopter specific CFI lesson plan that's available for sale for free on the Internet, go ahead and put that below. We'd love to hear it, but I want to give you my take on it and I'm going to tell you what I did you. Any one of you of course is welcome to do whatever you want to do. Making your CFI lesson plans. You have to have them for the CFI checkride. It's in the PTS that you have a lesson plan library. Okay. So this is a given. You have to have a set of lesson plans. If you want to adopt someone else's and change it to fit your own, great. Again, put some down there and help out Dan if you got any ideas of what to use. Here's what I did. I made my own CFI lesson plans and I hand wrote them all out and I put them in my notebook. Haven't talked much about the notebook lately. But the notebook is what I started with after failing my first checkride and then I used it for all my ratings. I put together my own study notebook and then I put my lesson plans right in that great big thick notebook that many of you seen over the years. I put my lesson plans in the back of that. And what I did is I went through the, at that time would be the rotorcraft flying handbooks before we switched to the helicopter flying handbook. And I went through and I did a lesson plan and I hand wrote them for every single maneuver and I went through and wrote them out for every single aerodynamic principle. All the emergency stuff for the helicopter that was going to be training and testing in. And I know that sounds like a lot of work for many of you, but we learned through repetition. We also learned from writing. And when I did that, I think it helped me because I'm putting it in my own words. And I want to mention that, you know, if you read the, say the helicopter flying handbook and then you go to the Robinson syllabus, it's about word. It's pretty darn close, right? And the reason I'm bringing that up, not to make people go, oh, Robinson, you know, and snoot their nose no matter what helicopter you're flying. The essence of flying helicopters is the same. There's some buttons and switches are in different places and you have different engines and you know, but as far as single rotored helicopters and that then you got the differences of clockwise and counterclockwise. But the essence of the maneuvers and the aerodynamics, all that stuff is the same. So for me personally, I'm glad that I took the time to write out my own CFI lesson plans and many of you are going to go, screw that. I'm not spending the time to do that. It helped me remember, it helped me form the teaching plan. And they were. And it's all handwritten in my own words. Right. And so the reason I mentioned the syllabus being very close to Rotorcraft Flying Handbook, in essence, all these maneuvers, no matter what you're teaching or where you're teaching or the aerodynamics in general, the stuff's going to be the same. So when you're going through it and you're formulating and kind of putting in your own words and you're writing it down, that is going to help you so much in learning the information. And the other thing that I did was, and my instructor advised me to do this and I did it. I went through for the most of the normal maneuvers like pickup, set downs, normal takeoff, normal landing. I went through and wrote out word for word how I would, how I would verbalize this in the aircraft to someone. And I recently went back and checked and What I'm doing 20 years later is still pretty darn close to what I sat and wrote out at that time. And it's so helpful when you take the time and you put the effort on effort in, into becoming a cfi. When you put that effort into building the lesson plans and writing out what the maneuvers are and what you're going to say, man, it just helped me so freaking much. And a little pre warning, you know, you got to know what's in your lesson plans. And this is why I'm not big on, oh, just go buy somebody's lesson plans or borrow somebody else's or copy somebody else's and just use them. I mean you can certainly do that, but you better go through them and know them. And the example I'm going to give you, I'm doing my CFI checkride with Tim Tucker in California and I'm proud of that fact. And I've even talked to Tim this year at Heli Expo and teased him about how it was an eight hour oral and he said, oh no, it wasn't. I'm like, yeah, it was the guy that prepared me for my CFI with Tim Tucker, he's like, no matter what you open, do not open anything that you're not absolutely 100% positive you're ready to teach. And I got nailed on that, on something in the Rotorcraft Flying handbook, the most intimidating page in there with a bunch of diagrams I'm leafing, looking for something, and Tim sees that, stops and goes, teach me about that page. And I was like, oh my God, right? And then even worse, I was teaching Tim a subject and I forget which one it was, but he was looking for the term blowback. And that's all he wanted, was just the term. I understood the. I understood what blowback is and how it happens. And he's going, yeah, but what do you call that? And I. And I'm sitting there and I'm stumped, right? I can't, I can't bring my, the, the thought, the name blowback. I couldn't bring it up, right? He goes, give me your lesson plans. So I slid it over there and he looks at the lesson plan that I'm teaching, right? And he flips the page and guess what's on the backside of that page on my lesson plan? The term blowback. And he probably isn't going to want me to tell you this, but here's what he said. He sees it and he goes, you know, he takes my notebook and slides it across the table to me. He goes, do you know your own lesson plan? You know, or some comment like that that made me feel this big, right? Because it was in the lesson plan. I'd even wrote it out. And in the heat of the moment, taking the CFI checkride with Tim Tucker, I was just so, you know, freaked out, right? And just couldn't. In that moment in time, I knew the term blowback, but I was nervous. As you could imagine. An eight, eight hour checkride with Tim Tucker. That was tough, but I made it. So there you go. That's my take on the CFI lesson plan. Of course, you're welcome to do whatever you want to do and works for you. If you're going to adopt someone else's man, I would just make sure you work through them. It'd be so easy to just copy someone else's or down some load something off that you get online and then not really know it that well. That would be my only advice. If you're going to use someone else's, you're going to modify yours from another source. Make sure you go through those damn things and make sure that you know them, because it's fair Game during the CFI checkride, you know, examiners will usually do something like, you know, okay, prepare, have two things ready for the day of the checkride. My examiner 20 years just commonly does this. Anyway, he'll say, I want you to have your applicant teach, you know, this and this, like say, selling with power and then a proper set down. And then I'm going to have your applicant do one off the cuff the day of the checkride. And that's how he's done it all these years. So as an applicant, you go, you go to the CFI checkride knowing the two that you're going to teach. So you've got time to have those out and print them off and modify them and do everything you want to do. But then when he gives you one the off the cuff, you have to have either a lesson plan or, you know, use some type of resource, the helicopter flying handbook or the PoH or whatever publication you could use to teach that subject. So that's my point. Understanding what's in the lesson plan, knowing that they're yours, making them yours, you know, whether you build them from scratch like I did or whether you adopt someone else's, just take the time to make sure you go through them and understand them. That's my best tip on the CFI lesson plans. If you guys are all using something or girls that's available online, put it, put the link below because again, I think of any one person, you're welcome to do whatever you want to do, but you got to have the lesson plan library with you for the CFI checkride and whatever library you have, however you get it or however you build it, make sure you know what's in it and make sure you're prepared to teach everything in there. That's my best tip on that one. So do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. Click that little bell when you do. We do a daily video. This was 217. Just got back from the big California trip. It's freaking awesome. I'm digging the pinon coffee. I looked up a YouTube video from the company to make sure I could say it right. I think that's right. Pinon. Pinon coffee. This is different, but boy is it really good. Awesome. Thank you again, Michael. So cool. Well, first day back after being gone to California. Time to go do some boating. Boats are out there looking a little bit lonely. Yeah, I better go take them out and have some fun. That's right. Hell yeah. Peace out. See you next video.