Dark Clouds

Half our class failed the practice Gleim exam on Monday, which also means half our class is now grounded until next Thursday when we can take the retest.   I am one of them.  Ive hit the books even harder than before and Ive finally gotten my score to range between 80 and 95 percent.  Still not great but in the range I need.  Tuesday came along and there was a nice little note in our mailboxes stating that so many people complained about the work load that Saturdays will once again be shutdown to give us more time to breath… that is… until another storm comes a knocking.

I searched for my ground school instructor to sign the progress report to officially declare me being grounded.  The write up was fair and essentially put most of the responsibility of failure on managements decisions to over work us.  At this time I was told I had a meeting with the VP of DCA operations to discuss “what happened” at 11:00.  Nice!

At 10:45 I walked into the executive offices and checked in with the personal assistant.  I went into the office and met Mr. VP and Mr. Head of Student Education.  They had my records in front of them which showed two high 90 scores from the stage tests and the below 70 score on the practice Gleim.  They asked for my take on the situation.  I explained everything I had done with the head of flight operations a few weeks ago, as well as I understood Tropical Storm Fay was not their fault, but the workload of the  two classes of ground work and radio communications class followed by two flight events was barely allowing us to be safe pilots at the cost of no time to study all the materials expected of us.  I also explained that the chapters of the gleim book was not paired with what we were learning in ground school.  It didn’t make sense!  Why teach us one thing, and have us go over something completely different in the gleim?  I gave an example of how much better I would do on the self practice tests after a ground school lesson because someone finally explained to me why something or how something works.  It would improve my percentage anywhere from 5 to 10 percent.   They agreed.  I walked out of the office with a very satisfied feeling.  DCA is really working hard to help us out.  I’m curious to see what changes will be made.

Here we are Friday and our instructor whom I am compelled to start calling Obi Wan made the announcement that because of our class, future classes will have a ground school more in sync with the gleim material.  They also will only have one flight event a day until they wish to increase their work load.  It’s a start.  Then the bad news came.  There are only two instructors that teach ground school.  These two instructors alternate taking on classes.  Because September lines up with highschoolers graduating, there are two classes that start during different times of the month.  Which means one of the two instructors will have 3 classes while the other has none.  So our class will be losing Obi Wan, and going to a different instructor.  This seriously bites!  The class protested. One classmate thought we should write a letter to management in protest and they are looking to me to write it. A letter is brewing in my head.  Whether I write it or not, I wouldn’t care if nothing comes of it.  Something must at least be said.  They’ve already screwed our work load and we are struggling to catch up.  Now we need to learn a new teaching method and essentially start over. 

 

Sorry this one is so short this week.  I figured I wouldn’t bore you with details of taking a test over and over and over again.