BoDEAN wrote:

Thanks
I'll hit the sim today

With all due respect, I think this was the wrong answer. Hitting the
sim will probably help you pass the CFI-I checkride, but it won't do
much towards making you a better instrument pilot, or a better
instrument instructor.

When I took my CFI-I ride, I did a bunch of sim work too. I hadn't
really flown any NDB approaches since my initial instrument training,
and was having trouble getting them back up to snuff. It was a lot
cheaper to buy a copy of X-plane and fly a bunch of approaches at my
desk than to bore holes in the sky re-learning how an ADF works.

But, flying good approaches in the sim doesn't make you a good
instrument pilot, and being a good instrument pilot is essential to
being a good instrument instructor. A fair amount of instructing
involves letting the student make mistakes, both in terms of procedures,
and in judgement. With instruments, the limits of how big a mistake you
can let them make are smaller, and the consequences of going too far
much worse than VFR. But, you still need to let them explore the edges
of envelope. And to do that, you need to know what's safe w/r/t getting
killed, what's safe w/r/t getting ATC ****ed at you, and what's safe
w/r/t you being able to recover from the mess you let your student dig
themselves into.

Another thing I've discovered about instructing (especially in busy
airspace like around New York), is that a fair part of your job is being
able to anticipate what ATC will let you do and what they won't. Some
of my biggest failures have been flights where I came up with a lesson
plan only to discover that ATC denied us the clearances required to
execute the plan.

The problem is, unless you're out there flying in the system, in
weather, experiencing and coping with real-life problems yourself, you
won't have the experience to pass on to your students, and you won't
have the judgement to know where to draw the line on making mistakes.
You won't get that in a sim.