Diary Of An ADI

Learning how each pupil’s mind works is important. They can surprise you very easily.

I’ve had a handful of people who, when asked to turn right at a roundabout, have literally tried (or intended) to turn right – as if it were just a crossroads. In all cases they hadn’t heard the word ’roundabout’ and after questioning (and sometimes following tears) it became clear that they didn’t recognise the big concrete circle in front of them as a roundabout. In one case, this was less than 30 seconds after we’d just gone around it from the opposite direction!

You have to be ready for it. No pupil has ever actually done it: I’ve stopped them as soon as their hands have moved.

But one case I’ll always remember was driving down a country road with a pupil in clear weather and a clear road. We’re driving in a straight line, when suddenly I’m thrown from one side of the car to the other as we swerved sharply all over the place. After we’d righted and were going straight again I asked my pupil:

What did you do that for?

She said:

I was trying to avoid that horse poo in the road.

This was the same pupil who had once squealed and curled up in a ball in the driver’s seat while we were doing 50mph on a dual carriageway because a lorry had overtaken us. I simply took the wheel and – not quite following the Official Driving Instructor Teaching Guidelines – said:

Don’t EVER do that again

And she never did. She was the most entertaining pupil I think I’ve ever had.

On a more serious note, some people have real problems to deal with. I was teaching a pupil with dyspraxia and we’d sorted out his initial inability to raise the clutch gently in a real driving situation. When stationary he could find the bite gently, but when moving off his left leg was like a bungee cord: Boiing! Up like a shot.

One time we were driving at 60mph on a straight road. It was nearly 10pm, dark, and there were no other cars around. All of a sudden he just turned the wheel and we were heading towards the kerb. When I pulled us over and talked to him about it, I asked the question:

What made you turn the wheel in that situation?

He answered:

I honestly don’t know.

You get some pupils who are absolutely brilliant to teach every way you look at it. They book regular lessons, rarely cancel, always turn up, and they never cause you a problem.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve had pupils who have cancelled or changed more lessons than they’ve actually taken. I’m flexible to start with, I warn them if they carry on taking the mick, and I get rid of them if they do it again after that (I had one who had cancelled or rearranged 4 out of his first 5 bookings, then didn’t turn up to the next one he’d specifically arranged during a school holiday. To make matters worse, his dad reckoned he should be test-ready after only 12 hours, having never driven before!). To date, that’s only two out of hundreds of pupils I’ve ditched.

I have one who has only ever let me down once: I turned up one Saturday morning at 9am and he didn’t show. It turned out he was comatose in bed with a hangover. We don’t do Saturdays anymore.

I have another who had let me down by being at a music festival when I turned up to a booked lesson (apparently his phone battery had gone dead and he couldn’t contact me, nor I him). He’s on a final warning because the next lesson I turned up for he was absolutely paralytic at 6pm.

The other one I got rid of had used up all the possible excuses. One time she was painting her bedroom and ‘forgot’ the lesson. She was ‘ill’ more times than I have fingers to count with. But the best one was when she called an hour before her 6pm lesson – she was at school and the exam, which was scheduled to start at 3pm, still hadn’t begun. The last straw was when she was ill yet again. I simply told her I couldn’t afford not to teach her anymore.

To be honest, it’s best when they just tell you the truth: ‘I can’t afford the lesson this week’.

That’s becoming more common with the credit squeeze and all.

Just listening to the radio between pupils and I heard that a promotional video for the 2012 London Olympics had been withdrawn because of complaints. Guess why?

Some moron had used a portrait of Myra Hindley – who was serving a life sentence for serial child murder until her death in 2002 – as part of the promotion! You can read the full story on the BBC website.

Whoever did that is just further proof of the plummeting intelligence levels we have to put up with in the UK these days. How stupid could someone possibly be to even think of doing this?

A very old post – one of the first I wrote, in fact. My style has changed a lot since then.

I have a pupil who is taking a long time to grasp certain aspects of driving. She’s been having particular problems with road markings, road signs and signals, and roundabouts – in spite of having done well in excess of 50 hours training between me and her previous instructor. Well, we went out yesterday and dealt with some of the biggest roundabouts in this area and I think she’s got it at last!

Admittedly she still sometimes over-reacts to the red light (slamming the brakes on) and not the green arrow saying she can go when she comes up to those phased light signals. She just seems to see things differently to everyone else. But the signs are good for the future.

Two more dangerous examples of overtaking on Saturday whilst out with a pupil doing Pass Plus. We were on a 60mph road – a known accident blackspot (almost daily someone nearly manages to kill themselves, and every couple of weeks one of them succeeds) – doing 60. Typical Saturday afternoon traffic. A blue Toyota Aygo (VN56 XRM) driver uses his peanut-sized brain to the max and overtakes in the face of oncoming traffic. You should have seen the faces of the two middle-aged women in the car he almost collided with! He spent the rest of the length of the road just in front, so what he thought he was proving is anyone’s guess.

Then, about 40 minutes later a black Toyota Corolla (GV52 XMR) carried out an equally dangerous stunt – with equal evident purpose – at traffic lights.

One thing you notice when you are a driving instructor is how certain groups of drivers behave on the roads. Taxi drivers, for example, fall into two categories. The official **˜black & whites’ – that’s the big cabs you can legally flag down – stop anywhere they want, and the more incovenient or dangerous the spot, the more likely they are to stop there. Private hire cabs – the ones you book by phone – typically drive everywhere at 50mph, even when they’re executing one of their familiar U-turns in heavy traffic on a main arterial road without the use of indicators. It saves fuel, you see.

So perhaps the one I encountered this evening ( well, 20/08/08 – I was moving the blog) needs to go back to Taxi Driver College. I was with a pupil and we were driving through a set of traffic lights – the kind where the single lane becomes two on the approach and then becomes one again after you’ve gone through. It had rained quite heavily and there was spray, and it was fairly dull. The pupil was driving at 40mph and the lanes were just merging back into a single. We’d had the usual rush of VW Golfs and Corsas determined to get past just so they could sit in front of a learner instead of behind one. But right at the last minute a taxi comes flying up and slams his brakes on just in front of us, and then spends the next two miles tailgating the cars in front, resolutely refusing to make eye contact. It was dangerous enough for us to have to swerve and brake harshly. This, of course, is standard taxi-driver behaviour, but when the road eventually became a dual carriageway he sped off at around 80mph in a most un-taxi like way. I suspect he was probably embarrassed by what he’d done and was uncomfortable driving around those who’d seen him do it.

I was out with a pupil last night (20/08/08 actually – I’ve been messing with the blog software) and we were driving in the left lane of a two lane road. Our lane became a bus lane after about 500 metres and I’d pointed out to the pupil that she should plan ahead because there were parked cars in it. Meanwhile I was watching this guy in a people-carrier who had been following us about 3 car lengths behind for the last quarter of a mile. As my pupil approached the bus lane merge I could see this idiot speed up just enough to prevent her from moving out. He had to break the speed limit to do it, since my pupil was doing exactly 30mph, but then he just sat alongside us. My pupil was obviously flustered and the instant the car twitched (obviously, I wasn’t going to let her have an accident) he sounded his horn. You could almost see the look of joy on his face – similar to what it must be like if you win the lottery. It was probably the highlight of his whole week sounding that horn at a learner.