LLAB 17 - 2 Feb 10

Today, we moved LLAB down the street to Columbia College. Detachment 440 is located at the University of Missouri-Columbia, but includes 6 crosstown colleges and universities from which cadets commute from on Tuesdays. Later in the semester, we plan on holding LLAB and class at one crosstown school, the University of Central Missouri, nearly 100 miles away in Warrensburg, MO. Before we make that complicated move, we had a "trial version" at Columbia College, which is just down the street from MU.

After the squadron commanders established accountability and insured that everyone had made the journey, the freshman and sophomores broke up to practice drill.

The freshmen practice drill manuevers involving the guidon, the symbol of each flight. The Guidon-bearer marches in front of their flight, allowing the flight to be identified. The guidon is a source of pride for a unit, a military tradition possibly going back as far as 5,000 years ago.

For more information on guidons and colors, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colours,_standards_and_guidons

The sophomores practiced marching through traffic, crossing an imaginary intersection. To avoid being hit by drivers who are texting on their cell phones, flight commanders march using road guards. When a flight approaches an intersection, they halt and the flight commander stops traffic. They deploy cadets to be road guards, who keep traffic halted while the flight commander focuses on marching his or her flight across the street. It is a somewhat complicated process that is very important to get the hang of before attending Field Training, as the chaotic nature of Field Training puts cadets in a stressful environment. Adding traffic to the situation only increases the stress and proper road guard procedures insure the safety of the flight and the cadets marching in it.

The flight commander enters the intersection of a road first to stop traffic, before deploying his or her road guards. With the road guards in place, the flight commander marches his or her flight through the intersection.

Afterwards, the cadets split up into their squadrons and practiced Group Leadership Project, or GLPs. These are scenerios in which a problem must be solved. A cadet is chosen as a leader, and is evaluated on his or her's performance, leading the group. Afterwards, the evaluator lists what the leader did well and what needs to be improved upon.

GLPs are a good leadership exercise that lets cadets learn from the mistakes from others and gives cadets experience in leading a group to solve a problem.