How hard is it to ride a motorcycle?

I signed up with local rider instructors RTI a couple of weeks ago to each people how to ride motorcycles. What I expected was a few weekends in the class room swapping stories about how to motivate people before heading out to a parking lot somewhere to encourage the timid and chastise the overconfident.

How wrong I was.

What I'm actually getting is a well organized series of lectures on topics such as first aid, motivating adult learners and ultimately running through each of the various lessons before being let loose as an apprentice instructor. I even had a test and I'm dreading getting the results back...

One thing I had forgotten is how much detail there is involved. Turns out it's enough that my course seems to involve homework. At present, I'm boiling the first six lessons down to cue-cards so I can do mock-teaching this coming saturday. Later today, I'll be practicing in front of the mirror or possibly @marina if she'll listen. Perhaps not.

Reading through the notes, I'm thinking how obvious most of this actually is but if asked, I doubt i'd be able to recite much of it before going back to school. My goal therefore is to constantly remind myself that it's only obvious as I've been riding for years. My job as an instructor is to help convey all this information whilst remaining cheery and interested in it all. In practice, that means finding vaguely amusing anecdotes and analogies for each of the points.

For now, I'm going to be spending almost every saturday in the classroom and maybe by the end of March, I'll be allowed to head out to a course and actually put this into practice.

Part of me thinks I've made a huge mistake, but I'm also looking forward to helping bring through new riders. If nothing else, it's new experience. And I get to take the advanced course for free...