Ticking the boxes

I guess this post was going to be another insight into more teaching experiences but I think it may migrate away from that format and into a broader and ultimately more challenging area from my perspective at least.

Since I last posted I have indeed been teaching. I have just been up in Northland  interning on another Part 2 course. We even managed to get out to the Knights on the second day which gave us a real depth range to work on ascents in. 

We pushed hard on day 1 and 2 to get the majority of the academics ticked off and maximize our in water time on the last day. conditions were OK but a little surgy and this made it more challenging for the students to manage gas sharing and lift bags as well as other skills under task loading.

This was the first Part 2 I was to deliver from start to finish. I got stuck in and delivered as much as I could confidently. All of my major lectures are pretty much ticked off now in my intern stats and aside from a couple of signatures for S&P and some rescue skills I may be able to go for exam pretty soon! This is both an exciting and nervous prospect for me.

Throughout my interns I have been supported by a more senior instructor delivering content to questions that were above my knowledge level or outside the scope of the class. This has been great as students tend to ask questions across a range of topics and in a great many areas. It has given some great insights for me into how to handle difficult discussions but it is a double edged sword.

I know I can deliver the content of the course effectively and correctly but is my knowledge base big enough to be able to answer anything that is thrown at me? If and when I pass my exam I will be teaching alone without support of another instructor, so how can I try and broaden my knowledge base in order to handle such left field questions?

I guess this is the point I am trying to make. What is satisfactory for a GUE instructor to know in order to deliver a class? I want students to walk away from their class feeling that not only their skills have improved but also that their questions have been satisfactorily answered and their knowledge broadened.

The answer is to keep developing my own knowledge and not stop. There is never one single way in which you can  definitively answer questions and you will always be posed one you do not know the answer to. I must endeavor to honestly answer what I am capable of and not deliver content that I cannot support. I guess I have to realise that it is growing my knowledge every time I have to find something out, its just hard to be on the spot and not have all the answers!