Tuesday 6 August 2013

Creativity and driving instruction

Most issues people have when learning are repetitive, but pretty regularly things crop up that require a creative solution. It's often something simple and straightforward, but encountering problems and finding solutions to those problems is one of the things that keep my job interesting and rewarding.

What prompted this post was something that happened today. My pupil was struggling generally with driving. A lack of technique and structure was combined with panic and a lack of confidence. The solution to this is generally to give them a structure to follow, then repeat ad nauseum until it goes in.

Here is the structure. It consists of 7 steps. There are reasons for each step to take place in the order that it does, but for now, let's just get the steps written down here. They are:

Mirrors -> Signal -> Position -> Speed -> Look -> Decision -> Gear

We went through this while parked up, then gave it a go on a right hand loop. Nope. Not happening.

We parked up again, and I asked her to recite the steps. She kept stumbling over step three. Mirror. Signal. Decision, she would say, time after time. I realised that the problem didn't have much to do with driving. It had everything to do with language.

So I changed "Decision" to "Decide". It became phonetically much more distinct from "Position", and after a little bit more work, she had the sequence down. Once she had it down as an abstract, she was able to apply it on the road and a big improvement too place.

Y'know what? I love my job for stuff like this.

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