Instructor's thread.......?

well theres no age limit on powerboat driving it just comes down to insurance so they may well of been younger than 16!

When I was working as an AI (at 14), we were under the supervision of instructors but at the same time if we were confident enough on a subject we were allowed to teach pretty much anything under supervision. A lot of the time it was on the water and rarely went into theory stuff because the instructors course is based upon how to convey teaching skills and assumes you are very compedent at sailing because you have passed a pre-assessment before.

Yer most of the kids i teach have done some sailing before, but haven't quite got the hang of stuff like going to windward, ie. sail in etc., so we're just saying stuff like, " if you're going upwind, where should your sail be" etc.

I worked as an AI for a few years at my club. The basic sail training was held on Tuesday nights and Weekends, where the instructors were teaching the begginners. On a Thursday night, instructor training was carried out for the AI's and was open to Instructors sitting in too, which ran alongside the clubs race training program. We were basically going through the in's & out's of the instructors course at our club with our SI who taught us classroom presentation, etc. The trainee instructors, coming from a racing point of view, usually helped out with the race training because it allowed the trainees to instruct directly from a level of sailing that they were involved with and teaching more compedent sailors seemed to have less complications because they have a sense of what they are doing. Later on as an instructor, we supervised the AI's and gave them enough room to emphasise their confidence. When they were stuck, we subtley stepped in and took over from them. We ran a stage 3 course where at the same time as 2 instructors running the course, we had 3 AIs working for us. Between the 2 of us we were watching the kids and the AI's & throughout the course we were assessing the AI's and at the end of the week it was down to us to say who was suitable for going further on to the instructors course.

i am now a dinghy instructor! Finished the course today and am over the moon.