Ground Track In The Pattern

One of the few incontrovertible facts in aviation is that the ground never moves (California excepted). So, regardless of what kind of sophisticated electronic gadgetry you've stuffed into your airplane's panel, it can't tell you any more than the ground can. Look down, see where the airplane is going; if it isn't right, change it. Seems pretty basic, doesn't it? That's why just about everyone spends a good part of the first five hours of flight training out in the boondocks flying rectangular patterns around a cornfield. Later on, we do S turns across a road and turns around a point. All of this is to teach us how to counteract the effects of wind on the track we're making across the ground. By the time we're about 20 hours into our training, however, the only discussion of ground track is related to navigation and, even then, it is mentioned only in passing.
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