We were conducting an Instructor-level Vehicle Dynamics and Exercise Design program for a Federal Agency. When we passed out the calculators, one of the students was looking at the calculator like a monkey might look at a watch – confused. It wasn’t long before he came up to Tony and expressed his displeasure that he would have to learn math to pass the course. He, like many others we have trained, pointed out that during his high school days; (with some it even extends into their college days) math was the bane of his existence. In a roundabout way he made the point that he was concerned that he would not pass the course because of the math. Tony’s answer was the same for him as it has been for scores of others (five decades worth) with the same concern – hang in for a few days, and give it your best shot, while we give our best shot to teaching you the math.
Three days later, as we were on the track designing a training exercise to recreate a specific incident that involved their unique vehicles and the difference a new found knowledge of math and vehicle dynamics made was quite obvious. Tony had put together some guidelines for the students regarding the exercise design elements, and this same guy that had , just a couple of days before, been concerned about passing the course walks up to him and says “I don’t agree with the way you suggested we design this exercise”. He then proceeded to walk Tony through nearly a full page of calculations he had worked out to express how he thought the exercise should be designed and thoroughly explained why he thought that.
In just a few days this instructor had gone from being intimidated by the math(A Monkey Looking At a Watch) required to design driving exercises to combining his knowledge of the laws of physics (and, god forbid, math) with his operational knowledge of the agencies mission objectives, the unique vehicles they operated and the types of incidents they had faced in the past to develop an exemplary driving exercise; one in which the drivers capability to resolve the problem while maintaining control of the vehicle was able to be objectively measured and, more importantly, drivers would be able to recognize that they were fully capable of resolving successfully.
At the end of the day isn’t that the essence of training and teaching, getting people to do what they did’nt think they could do.