You'll do fine Lawrence, it was a bit of a learning curve for me due to the terms. Once I realized what some of these terms meant, it all started connecting the dots for me.
I went through the Krautkramer classes as well in Lewistown, PA back in Oct. 1999 for Level I and Jan. 2000 for Level II...at the old headquarters.
Instead of jet engines like Jeff stated, they had train/locomotive parts that they tested for the railroad nearby. One of the first phased array units was there in prototype when I sat through a refresher UT weld inspection course in 2004 and they showed us how it could scan a wheel/axle combo without disassembly due to the ability of scanning in multiple angles all at once.
As for hands-on the unit, they had USN 50's there and we turned them on the first day and went through the menus so we could learn to navigate the machine settings. The classroom and practical went hand in hand everyday. What Jim Farthe(SP?) showed us on the overhead, we practiced on the machine. Mainly stayed with straight beam stuff during the Level I class, but ventured into some angle beam math and scanning by the end of Level I. Level II we jumped in with both feet on the angle beam scanning. Understanding the math is essential in my opinion to be able to map out where your sound is expected to be and what you should expect to see with different transducer positions. Some complicated geometry can stump you if you are expecting to see something and it doesn't show up on the screen, be able to map it out can show you a bounce that you may not have predicted....or figure out that ghost signal that popped up out of nowhere...LOL