Thursday 25 June 2015

The good, the bad and the ugly

more vague ideas coalescing into more solid intentions.

Firstly, I don't really want to recruit current instructors. I'd rather train people to do things in a certain way, and get the best of them working under my name, until they've developed what they need to make a go of it for themselves.

I now have two trainees. One is the guy I blogged about back in January. The other is a bus driver, who did some instructor training about 10 years ago but never took it too far. He's been with me for a couple of sessions now.

Back in January, I wrote,

Anyway, the other night, I took someone out for an instructor training session. As I mentioned in a recent post, this person didn't seem ideally suited to the role, but without ever meeting him, I couldn't really form a judgement...

...The training session went quite well. The feedback I got was positive. My pupil was about what I expected. Essentially bookbound. This is inevitable. To teach, you have to know, and when you first start, you need the props. My wannabe instructor, who'd come across as something of an oddball from what I'd seen on the internet, turned out to be a nice guy, who was trying very hard. There's a lot of work to be done, but I can work with that. Nice guy, trying hard. That's not at all a bad starting point
Six months down the line, and we're really no further on. For all the good intentions, this guy has absolutely no idea what he's doing, and no amount of training will turn him from the sow's ear he is into the silk purse he needs to be. He won't give up, but after 3 attempts at his teaching test, the option to continue will be taken from him. Meanwhile, he's spent thousands on a second hand car to teach in, and is now attempting to teach real people on a trainee license. Poor sods. He's already had to take one of them home in floods of tears after trying to get her to be able to reverse into a parking bay on her second ever lesson. He blames her for this rather than himself. I explained that really the second lesson should be about consolidating from the controls lesson, and that apart from a few very specific circumstances, you leave reversing until they have some idea how to drive forward. Today I saw him doing reversing in a quiet side street. I got my pupil to do a quick u-turn and we hightailed out of there.

I do feel some guilt about all this. It would perhaps have been better in retrospect to have just told him that I could not get him to where he needed to be, indeed that he was attempting to fit himself into a role for which he had no aptitude, yet all I've done is try my best. I didn't realise that someone could be quite so unreflective and unresponsive to their training, and by the time I did, we'd both invested a lot of time, effort and (for him), money. It seems we're locked into a rather macabre path, who's end I can see only too clearly, and which he seems to be oblivious to.

So it was good to get this new guy. He's keen, motivated, amenable to change, and has the makings of a good instructor. O happy day!

driving lessons in North Wirral? learn to drive in Hoylake? driving instructor in Birkenhead?

1 comment:

Pete said...

Compulsory VAT registration when annual rolling turnover (not profit, turnover) hits £82,000. Beware.