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Teach By Connecting With The Known
Date Added: December 01, 2010 07:59:29 PM
Author: jeanrivera
Category: Arts & Humanities: Education
“When landing an airplane, it’s important to understand the connection between power and pitch. The correlation between the two is especially important in the final moments of landing as the plane turns from its downwind leg to base prior to final approach.” Unless you’re at least a student pilot, many of the terms used in the preceding paragraph don’t mean anything to you. You’d probably be hard pressed after reading or hearing that paragraph once to state or explain the content. And yet we often put our students in just such a situation. The topics we teach are near and dear to us and we often recite the content unaware that to our students, the information exists in a vacuum. What we need to do is connect the new information we’re teaching to something to something our students have learned previously with us or already know. Here’s that same flying information explained in more detail with the assumption that most people have either flown commercially or have seen an airplane landing. “When an airplane is close to landing, it most often enters into a rectangular pattern in the sky near the airport. This traffic pattern keeps the airplanes safely away from each other as they complete their descent. The part of the rectangle that is parallel to the runway is called the downwind leg. It could be flown close to the airport or as far as a few miles away depending on a variety of circumstances – such as weather and how busy the skies are that day. When the pilot has completed the downwind leg, he/she makes a 90 degree turn to the what’s called the base leg which is the next to the last turn before the final approach to land. You may have noticed the plane turning a few times before landing and now you know that this is a well planned out process. To help the plane descend at the right rate, the pilot must understand the relationship between power and pitch. Pitch is where you’re pointing the front or nose of the plane. Pitch is up, down or level. Power in a plane is like stepping on the accelerator in a car. The more power you give a plane, the faster it will go and the more it will rise. A pilot landing must reduce power to slow the plane down and also to lower the plane. To land the plane the pilot must blend the correct amount of power with the proper pitch to land the plane on the runway. There are constant minor adjustments when landing due to changing wind velocity and direction.” Hopefully there is now enough information that you could probably describe a landing pattern to someone else and have a reasonable conversation about pitch and power. You still wouldn’t be an expert at flying nor could you actually land a plane but you’d at least have some reference to the subject because the terms were explained as they related to previously known experiences and information. If there are too many unknown words or concepts, it’s like the information is in a vacuum and it’s hard to understand. I experienced this feeling of disconnect last year when I was watching the SuperBowl. I have a limited knowledge of football but I’m willing to learn more. My Dad and brother told me I could ask any questions as long as they were during commercials. Fair enough. I did fine for the first few minutes of the game but as the game progressed, the commercials were not nearly enough time to answer my questions which were becoming more detailed. Their answers became quicker and more technical. My level of understanding began to drop dramatically as they used more and more words that were familiar and comfortable for them but confusing and unfamiliar to me. I remember wondering if this was how kids often felt in school. When we teach our subject matter to our students we need to connect to what they currently know. Whether it’s material previously learned in our class or information from the world outside the school environment, our teaching and their learning must not occur in a vacuum. We must occasionally remember what it’s like to be the student, to feel what it’s like not to know. custom writing service
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