It’s Air and Water Show weekend in Chicago. Meaning every quotable line from Top Gun is right there for the taking. (Especially if you are a highly skilled photographer). Its no help that for a lot guys my age the movie runs in a loop in our heads 24/7.
One of my mentor teachers, and also my first across the-the-hall neighbor in Vegas, were both former Air Force fighter pilots stationed at Nellis. Since they were already basically rocket scientists when it came to physics, the transition to teaching high school math was an obvious one that the district encouraged. I always noticed they had a somewhat “different” approach to teaching that I could never quite put in words.
I’ve said for years that Top Gun and Maverick were Teacher Movies. Maybe not in the Freedom Writers or Stand and Deliver sense, but there is something to be learned about teaching and learning and meeting the needs of changing times and asking for forgiveness rather than permission and the possibilities for student achievement.
I’m even more convinced after reading Dan Pedersen’s 2019 memoir Top Gun: An American Story.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know the setup. “During Korea, the Navy kill ratio was 12-to-1. We shot down 12 of their jets for every one of ours. During Vietnam, that ratio fell to 3-to-1.”
And it turns out, that wasn’t because American pilots got worse at dogfighting. To the contrary, decisions made by leaders in Washington, far from the tip of the spear, hamstrung our pilots. Pedersen notes that strategists were enamored with the idea of using guided missiles from a distance to down enemy craft, rather than using onboard guns. Problem was, the navy’s rules of engagement did not allow fighters to fire on an enemy until they had visual contact. At that point the guided missiles were virtually useless and the American jets, flying without guns (a nod to keeping the weight of the craft as low as possible) were easy targets.
The lack of guns also hampered the US pilots’ ability to provide air cover for ground operations. It was a problem begging for a solution, and that solution needed to come from men who had sat in a cockpit and faced down an enemy.
(I’m an army dad and keenly aware of the stark difference between teaching and going to war for your country. But I think we can agree that I nodded a little bit thinking about people making decisions who would not have to implement those decisions, nor face the consequences of trying to function under the constraints of those decisions.)
Untold in the movie was the story of an underground dogfighting scene off the California coast. Pilots were encouraged to get as much seat time as possible so they were authorized to “check out” a jet and get in the air pretty much any time. Pilots would secretly head to restricted airspace over San Clemente Island, find a willing opponent, and with hand signal the “dogfight” was on.
Pedersen notes parenthetically,
“Here’s the thing. You learn by doing. Those of us who lived to fly learned our craft by flying a lot. We intercepted wayward airliners, and did our own troubleshooting when things went wrong with our birds. The men I most admired in the Navy were the old-school fighter pilots. I wanted to be a throwback, ready to face adversity on my own wits.”
Top Gun, pg. 42
Part of the attraction of this “fight club” was the chance to match up with different aircraft, which had varied strengths and weaknesses. But when similar aircraft engaged in a certain maneuver, Pedersen points out “the difference is pilot skill and aggressiveness. The winner is usually the one with the most guts to push his aircraft to its aerodynamic limit”.
And this:
“Every pilot had his own bag of tricks. We learned by watching other guys beat us with them. Others we picked up in late-night shop talk in Coronado bars. Unusual maneuvers, little ways to extract just a bit more performance from your aircraft and other jewels, were shared and discussed. The knowledge – and the liquor – flowed with equal speed in those sessions.”
Top Gun, pg. 46
I’m far from the first person to draw the connection between Top Gun and teaching. Matt Miller built an entire keynote around it one year. (I have the sticker). But the analogies for the teacher here are clear.
- You get better by doing. The year I made the most improvement as a broadcaster was a year I must have called 100 games between football, prep basketball, small college basketball, and baseball. Everytime I opened a mic was a chance to improve. Same with teaching. The last handful of years I’ve been single-prepped so I present the same lesson six or seven times. If I’m not way better at it by the sixth class, that’s on me. I haven’t learned anything.
- Sometimes the difference between a so-so lesson and one that really clicks with students is: what risk am I willing to take? Can I push beyond the tried and true and make (or borrow) something that will make math pop for my kids?
- The debrief is cruicial. Teachers need collaboration time to share successes and failures, tricks of the trade and new techniques. Ten brains are better than one. In my building we are working hard to build in time for teachers to drop by and watch other teachers teach. I can say from experience that a different persepective can open new doors in my own classroom.
The lessons gleaned from these impromptu “hassles” between pilots out over the open Pacific formed the foundational elements of Top Gun. After a lengthy tour in Vietnam, Pedersen had been assigned stateside to serve as a tactics instructor at Miramar. At about the same time, a commander of a carrier that had been deployed off Vietnam produced a 200-page report detailing the root causes of the US failures in air combat during the war. Part of that report was a recommendation to establish “an Advanced Fighter Weapons School”.
And Top Gun was born. Pedersen’s chain of command offered him the opportunity to start and run the program and he took it.
Pedersen selected eight top-notch fliers to his staff of instructors, each chosen because of expertise in a specific technical area. And because they were woefully underfunded, the “Original Bros” as they called themselves, set about scraping and scrounging to obtain the needed space and tools to get started.
All of us working in underfunded schools have a wry smile right now. We might as well all get matching “beg, borrow, steal” tattoos.
And another connection to teaching that Pedersen made plain as paste:
“Topgun was best understood as a graduate school. It functioned essentially like a teachers’ college for fighter pilots. Our job was not just to teach pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. It was to teach pilots to teach other pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. Our first class of students, handpicked by their squadron commanders to join us at Miramar in sixty short days, would spend about five weeks with us and then return to their units to spread to their peers what we had taught them. In this way the Navy hoped to leverage a multiplier effect, seeding ideas in a geometric progression as a class of eight went out to teach eight times sixteen more.”
Top Gun, pg. 106
Everyone who’s ever been to a “train the trainer” workshop knows the theory. Top Gun put it into practice. Probably most important was, the training and the tactics worked. Good pilots became great. And their enthusiasm boiled over.
Pedersen explains the progression when teaching a new maneuver. Instructor is the pilot, student in the back seat. They run through the maneuver so the student could experience it and know he would survive. Then they switch seats.
“Out over the desert or the ocean, I’d coach him through the vertical maneuver. He had never dreamed a Phantom could do it, but our rugged machine performed the same way every time. Once the student decided he could trust it, he was exhilarated to fly the F-4 as it was never supposed to be flown.
Back on the ground there was always a lot of laughing and hollering from the front cockpit. The student would be ready to beat his chest. And trust me on this: once four or five twentysomethings have an experience like that, the energy level at the O club that evening is something to see. If you walk in and witness it, the buzz isn’t rowdy idiocy. It’s the sound of people believing in themselves, in their aircraft, in their leadership, in their weapons, and in their ability to win a war when it all comes together.
The day to start worrying about your military is the Friday night you go into an officers’ club and everybody’s quiet, staring into their beer.”
Top Gun, pp. 131-132
True from teacher to student, from coach or admin to teacher. If you’re lucky enough to have had that classroom moment when the bell rings and you’re ready to beat your chest, when you’ve learned a way you didn’t know existed, you felt that line deep in your gut.
Because I bet you’ve felt that silent Friday night too.
In his introduction, Pedersen states, “The eight men who joined me in a condemned trailer at Naval Air Station Miramar in late 1968 had gone into the war thinking we were the best pilots in the world flying the best aircraft armed with the best weapons. The North Vietnamese showed us otherwise. We were ready to do whatever it took to find a way to win.”
Same, sir. Same.
Tweaking For No Reason 