A couple of weeks ago, I did a fund-raiser CHL class for the Greater Dallas Republicans. I had 29 students in the class, many of whom had little or no experience firing a handgun. That made for a challenging class. I discovered that some of the paperwork procedures that I had used successfully in smaller classes (I normally limit my classes to 16 students) simply did not scale well at all, making things a bit more chaotic. And on top of that, the classroom and range facility that I used made some minor changes in procedure. It’s always a little surprising to me how just a minor change in my routine can throw me off my game. Fortunately, my brother was there to help, and while we both ended the day feeling like we’d been run over by a truck, we did manage to get through with most of the students having had a good learning experience.
Before I left that night, my brother and I had a talk with the range owner, and went some of the problems we had. He made some really good suggestions for improvement. My brother and I brainstormed a bit over the following week, and we came up with some other things to try.
I had the opportunity to experiment with some new procedures in a smaller class yesterday (June 12th, 2010). Since I only had 10 students, I didn’t ask my brother to come down from Pittsburg (TX), but my wife helped me run through some of the changes in procedure (she handled the notary and the student check-in). We had some glitches in the new procedures, but since the class was small, we were able to handle them fairly easily without the class dissolving into chaos, and I think I have found things that will scale well enough to work for very large classes. Meanwhile I have thought of a few more ideas for making the class go more smoothly, and enhance the experience that the student has in this very long class day.
I have been at this for over 8 years now, and I continue to learn and improve my classes.
One thing that became very clear to me is that the range testing for inexperienced students becomes exponentially harder with increasing class size. When you have only one or two inexperienced students on the firing line, you can give effective coaching, and almost always get them to shoot well enough to pass, but only through reminding them of the very basics before nearly every round. In a very large class, you are likely to have 6 or more inexperienced shooters on the firing line, and you simply can’t provide the same level of coaching — and invariably, one or two of them will fail the test on the first try, in spite of the fact that the range test is almost insultingly easy. I have come to the conclusion that my predisposition to accept completely inexperienced students (especially in the larger classes) doesn’t really do them any real favor, and I need to require some experience or training in basic handgun safety and marksmanship before accepting a student into my CHL class.
Because of this, I got certified as an NRA instructor for the Basic Pistol Shooting course, and I am offering those courses starting in July 2010. The first class is being offered at an introductory rate of $89, but that is really too low a rate to cover my costs and my time for a smaller class. For that course, I want smaller groups, and I want to use a co-teacher in order to make sure every student gets the maximum benefit, so I will be raising my course fee to $139/person (perhaps more) after my first presentation of the class. I will be limiting the class size to 8 students. Students wanting to take a combined NRA+CHL class can take the CHL range test the same day as the NRA portion, while the NRA marksmanship training is still fresh on their minds, and will be able to finish the CHL portion of the course earlier than the rest of the class.
