Knowing The Why

As a former psych student... near graduate...

Did you know that the way a drill sergeant behaves is carefully calculated?

It's an act.

An act calculated to mold the minds of the typical customer they're given to train.

There's lots of other things they do to recruits to encourage they conform to the mold, but the drill's act is key.

The thing that occurs, of late, is how many firearms instructors I've seen conforming to this teaching model.  I guess it makes sense that they'd use a system they'd seen working first hand; since being a veteran is de riguer for running a training center.

The problem is that this methodology only works on specific kinds of people if you skip all the other conformity items that come with basic training.  Without the other trappings, it's worthless to the others, especially people who're veterans.  Ever wonder why the environment at AIT is so different from basic?

Oddly, it's worth is restored when teaching cops who are veterans if there's a group because it restores some of the motivators from basic which won't be present for an individual customer.

Obscenities and codified humiliations only work with a relatively small portion of the population and harden the minds of most others against the teaching; wasting their time and money.

I'm not sure it's related, but there's another stream running in trainers concerning the durability of your gun.  The round count for the class is high because?

It's not a gun test!  It's repetition of what the student has learned and getting that teaching cemented so they can practice it later.  It's a learning retention technique.

There's a couple three trainers who don't seem to get that.  The round count and gun endurance attitude are indications that they're teaching repetition by rote and don't know why they're doing it and weren't taught the 'why' of what they're teaching.  If I bring five guns out and destroy three in the class, I'll still learn the techniques.

Many self-taught people don't know why what they're doing is working, they just know it does work.  But it can lead to superfluous actions that aren't aiding the skill-set.

The gun endurance test really comes from the delay to the class when a student's ONLY gun goes down.  If the students bring guns that can go the entire class without breaking with zero maintenance, then the class doesn't have to stop to help anyone get their gun working again.  Time is limited and it's often drinking from a fire-hose paced.  I'll be damned if I can find more than a handful of instructors who seem to know that's WHY you want guns that will tolerate that kind of abuse.  (By the way, they KNOW it's abuse.  Ever notice they almost never provide the guns for class?)

I am also bemused at how several of the instructors who use the basic training template have also missed something taught at drill sergeant school.  "If the student has failed to learn, it is because you failed to teach."