Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkCO
I still can't get over the record of 47 classes. 
I'd be disappointed in myself if a student had to take a "refresher" class that is the same class they already took. The whole idea of a "class" is education. To help the student learn the material, develop good fundamentals on the subject so that when they leave the class, they know it. Sure, there is such a thing as continuing education, but that is what practice and competition is for.
I see guys that go to a class, get a little better and then the next year, they are back where they were, so they go to another class. That is not learning, that is paying an instructor to practice. |
I’m not even close to the guy with the most courses taken, believe it or not.
Most of my courses have not been repeats, but a few were. Even in the courses I repeated I still found something new. Generally it was a different instructor, and that person often has his/her own take on the course and that materializes in the way the course is taught. Additionally, I’ve been taking courses for I think 12 years or so now. Even in that short of a period of time, in the grand scheme of shooting sports, I’ve seen some noticeable changes in what was or wasn’t the “standard”, and that affects the way the courses are shot. Off the top of my head, appendix carry, looking at holsters when reholstering, the ability to target focus with red dots, how to use weapon lights, and more than this have seen pretty dramatic changes. Now if you’re taking the same course year after year, I would consider that nonproductive. It can be an easy trap to keep doing the thing you get good at, or at least comfortable with, rather than branch out.
When I take a course I take notes. At this point I have multiple notebooks worth of notes, easily enough to build a curriculum for myself and maybe one day my kids. I am almost always the only person taking notes. Maybe everyone else has a great memory, and I get that some people can’t multitask well. At the same time, I definitely have seen people show up, take a course, get what I see as constructive feedback, and then I see them in another course that year or next year still having the same difficulty. There are absolutely those that “pay an instructor to practice”. What I will say is that in talking to those people, for some of them they don’t have access to ranges that allow them to practice certain things and those local ranges might not host competitions either. There are those for whom opportunities aren’t easy to find. There’s an argument that they could make more of an effort to find opportunities (you have to be your own advocate), but sometimes that would involve physically moving and they can’t do that yet (often they are working on moving). If you live in an area where you have access to ranges that allow certain practice or larger stretches of public land that allow shooting, you’re rather fortunate compared to others out there.