ground study, negative transfer
One of my students is in checkride prep, and the other one will be starting checkride prep in a matter of days. And, the weather has been bad. So, I've been doing mostly ground study with them both. As for Student, her preferred examiner is not going to be available until the middle of January. Student wants to get her license this month, so we picked a different examiner. I'm going to call him today to find out what his availability is. Her mock checkride is on Saturday with W, so we've been hitting my oral exam study guide pretty hard this week. If the mock checkride goes well, we'll schedule her checkride. I'm going to be so glad when she's done. She's been great to fly with, but she's been working on her license for a long time, and she's had a number of irritating setbacks. She had lost a lot of her motivation by the time we started flying, but I can see that the measurable progress lately is helping a lot. That, and the looming checkride. She hates studying, but I could tell at our last ground session that she's been doing it. We flew through a lot of material that we struggled through before. It will be so nice to see her work paying off when she finally gets her license.

Since I don't have anything to write about flying, here's a sort of aviation-related vignette. A few months ago, my car's check engine and emergency brake lights started flashing on and off at high RPMs. I idly mentioned it to someone, and he said my alternator was probably going. Over the next few weeks, the lights started coming on at lower and lower RPMs, until finally, they were on almost all the time. I wasn't concerned -- I was happy deferring fixing this until I felt like getting around to it, because who cares if my radio doesn't work? I can live with that until I get around to putting in a new alternator. A couple of weeks later, I learned that cars don't work quite the same as airplanes. I learned this going down the interstate at 60 MPH. At night. And didn't I feel silly.