Chapter 12 — What to Expect at Your First Class

Ben

Here is what walking into your first class actually looks like.

I write this chapter because nearly every new student tells me, after their first session, that they wish they had known what to expect. The information was not hidden. Nobody had simply put it in one place, in plain language, before they showed up.

This chapter puts it in one place.

— Ben

What to wear, what to bring, what to leave at home

What to wear. Comfortable clothes that you can move in. Closed-toe shoes — flip-flops and sandals are a hard no on a live range, and your instructor will tell you so. A crew-neck or higher shirt; loose v-necks invite hot brass into uncomfortable places. Pants with belt loops if you will be drawing from a belt. A baseball cap is helpful if you are outdoors. If you wear contacts or glasses, bring spares.

What to bring. Eye protection rated for impact. Ear protection — and consider electronic hearing protection, which lets you hear the instructor while still protecting your hearing. Water. A snack if your class is more than two hours. A notebook, if you are the kind of student who takes notes. Whatever firearm and gear your instructor specifically asked you to bring.

What to leave at home. Loaded magazines, unless your instructor has specifically directed otherwise. Strong opinions. The need to perform for anyone. Your phone, or at least the urge to check it. Almost anything you would bring to impress your peers is going to be the opposite of what serves you in a real first class.

The first fifteen minutes

The first fifteen minutes are the hardest, and they are always the hardest. Knowing that in advance does not eliminate the discomfort — but it does normalize it.

You will be nervous. Your hands may shake a little. The sound of the range, even with hearing protection on, is louder than you expected. The instructor is watching you, which feels strange even when you trust them. There will be a small voice in your head wondering whether you should actually be here.

That voice is not telling you the truth. It is telling you that you are doing something new in front of people who know more than you do. That feeling does not mean you should not be there. It means you are normal.

By the end of the first half hour, the nerves are mostly gone. By the end of the first session, the instructor is no longer a stranger and the range is no longer a foreign country.

How to handle being the least experienced person in the room

A simple principle: assume nothing about anyone else’s skill level, including their assumptions about yours.

Most of the people in the room are not paying attention to you. They are paying attention to themselves — to their own grip, their own performance, their own nervousness. The few who notice you are doing so with goodwill, not judgment. Serious students know that everyone started somewhere, and they remember their own first sessions.

If you are nervous about being a beginner, the right move is the one Diane made: be a beginner, on purpose. Ask the question you are embarrassed to ask. The instructor would rather answer it now than discover, three sessions later, that you have been working around it.

How to handle being more experienced than you expected to be

A different problem, for a different student. Marcus walked into his first private session expecting to be quickly checked out and moved on to advanced work. He was not. He spent most of the session being shown fundamentals he thought he already had.

That experience is also normal. It is also the work. If you have been around firearms your whole life and walk into a serious training environment expecting to skip the beginning, expect instead to be shown that the beginning is not where you thought it was.

Questions you can ask without sounding foolish

None of them are foolish. Here are some examples.

• “Can you show me that again?”

• “What am I doing wrong?”

• “Is this the grip you wanted?”

• “Why does it work that way?”

• “What should I focus on between now and the next session?”

• “Can I take a moment?”

A good instructor will not just tolerate these questions. They will be relieved to hear them. The student who asks is the student who learns.

Sidebar — Sarah’s morning

She set her coffee down at five forty-five and stared at the bag she had packed the night before. Eye protection. Electronic ear pro. A small notebook. A change of socks, on Ben’s recommendation. She had read the email twice. She had laid the clothes out the night before.

She was nervous in a specific way she hadn’t felt since her first day in the emergency department, fifteen years earlier.

She drove the twenty-five minutes to the range without the radio on. She arrived ten minutes early. She sat in her car for two minutes. Then she got out, walked in, met Ben at the door, and said the only thing she had thought to say:

“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Ben smiled.

“Good. Let’s start there.”

Where this leads

After your first class, the real work begins — and almost none of it happens on the range. The single biggest determinant of how fast you progress in this discipline is what you do between formal sessions.

Let’s talk about practice.