And another.

Today I got a retirement card sent through the post to my home address.

Increasingly menacing. Tomorrow I will go to see the police with the stuff I've been getting. Just so they know.

_______________________________________________________________

And then I didn't. Bren made me think more carefully about it, and I realised I was reacting badly to someone who's obviously hurting.

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focus...

I took down a series of posts, on the advice of someone I trust. They do still exist. They've just been reverted to draft status.

I've recieved a couple of rather odd and disturbing communications over the last couple of weeks, and I'm a little bit concerned that I'm becoming the focus for somebody's unhealthy obsession.

The first was an email via my website's contact form. The second was a letter, delivered by the post office to my home address.

I have not responded in any way to either of them, and hope that this will die for lack of oxygen.

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Well, bugger me sideways!

He passed!

Nah. Just kidding.

Just as in the mock test, he failed to give anything like a proper briefing on the phase one part, and never got to grips with things in the phase two.

Result? A 2-2, just like on the mock.

This means I guaged things correctly, which is good to know.

I got a text stating that he plans to do his second attempt in Liverpool. If you're struggling to spit out the words on roads you're familiar with, doing your test on roads you don't know is going to be that much harder. I've told him that if he plans to do his test over the water, he will need to find a Liverpool based trainer, who knows the roads, as it would take a lot of time to get there and back from here, and I don't know the roads that well. I will not be going over to Liverpool with him. That's absolutely certain.

But why do such a thing?

To get from where he is now to where he needs to be is a huge task. A massive effort is needed to make the required changes. Faced with this, and unable to recognise his own deficiencies, this is a displacement activity. Make inconsequential changes instead of getting to grips with the changes that need to be made.

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Dancing

Let's just imagine that instead of teaching people how to drive (and teaching people how to teach people how to drive) I teach people how to dance.

One day, I get an email from someone who desperately wants to learn how to dance.
He's desperate. He wants it so so badly. He's prepared to pay good money. He's been turned down by 29 different dancing teachers, but he's heard that I'm a total hotshot when it comes to getting people dancing.

I agree to give him a lesson and find that  he has only got one leg, and a withered one at that.

Well, ok. Maybe we can somehow incorporate his crutch into his moves? If he's keen enough, why should only having one leg be an obstacle?

Over the next few lessons, it becomes apparent that he's also as deaf as a post, and can't hear the music, and is unable to learn the moves unless I write them down and point to them at the appropriate time with a pointy stick.

Ah. I can see I have my work cut out for me here, but hey! Wouldn't it be a coup? If I could get this guy dancing, wouldn't that make me just awesome?

So we carry on with the lessons, and find that he has problems with his vestibular system that mean he has severe problems with balance, and would probably keep falling over even if he had two fully formed legs.

But my one legged deaf dancer has staked a lot on this, and has spent quite a lot of money already. He's also decided that he wants to make a living as a dancer, and has quit his day job in anticipation. He has every faith in me. He shows me pictures of his wife and children. They look up at me with beseeching eyes. The kind of dancing he wants to do involves swinging buckets of sulphuric acid around, and if he gets things wrong, he might just kill or injure himself or his dancing partner, or a member of the audience.

There is of course, an ethical question here. The best dance teacher in the universe is not going to turn this person into a professional dancer, even if the wannabe dancer spends all of his life savings and ten years of his life on the project.

So is my job to do try to help him achieve his dreams to the best of my ability? Or should I tell him that I doubt anyone can help him, and refuse to take the gig? And at what point does the former become the latter? The warning signs were there, even before I'd met him for the first time. Why had he been turned away by all those others?

____________________

My first trainee instructor has until January 2nd to pass his teaching test. He gets three attempts to do so, and the third and final attempt must be booked before then, although if the date of the third attempt is later than that, the DSA will honour it as long as it was booked and paid for before the cutoff date. His first attempt is this coming Wednesday. Today he did a mock test. I did my best to put myself in the role of an examiner, who is himself in the role of a learner, and we did a full blown mock test.

The teaching test is in two parts. For the first part, the examiner will play the role of someone who hasn't done a particular thing before. After half an hour, that part of the test ends, and the examiner becomes someone who has done a particular thing before, but who may not be able to do it particularly well. Each part of the test is graded, and the overall result is two numbers. X/Y

Here are the criteria: To become a fully qualified instructor, at least a 4/4 has to be obtained.


Grade 6 - A very high standard with no significant instructional weaknesses
Grade 5 - A good overall performance with some minor weaknesses in instructional technique
Grade 4 - Competent performance with some minor deficiencies in instructional technique
Grade 3 - Inadequate overall performance with some deficiencies in instructional technique
Grade 2 - A poor overall performance with numerous deficiencies in instructional technique
Grade 1 - Overall standard of instruction extremely poor or dangerous

I gave my trainee a 2/2 but that was being generous. He needed to go through it in some detail with the person who'd never done it before, but had no words and gave up, instead electing to try to do it all on the fly. The pupil was being told to check his mirrors, without knowing what mirrors to check, to sort out his position, without knowing what that position should be, to slow down without any idea of what speed was required, and to change gear without knowing what gear to go into. The scope for mayhem was vast, and mayhem duly ensued. This is something that has happened before, when we've been training. He gave up on the briefing, and I drove on the edge of recklessness. I bollocked him for it too. To no avail. He's not going to miraculously acquire the extra leg or functioning set of ears that he needs, and no amount of training from me or anyone else is going to make any difference.

He's already stated that if he does fail, he intends to start the process again, but when (not if) that happens, I will have to tell him that I can take him no further.

I'm really not looking forward to it.

Update:

And now his car has broken down. To get a replacement, he's signed up as a franchisee with a driving school. Because of the way he is, he's vulnerable to people for whom the bottom line is all that matters. It would have been simpler and cheaper to contact a specialist car hire company and get a temporary vehicle for until his own car was mended. I don't know the precise details of what he's arranged, but he still intends to do his training with me.

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And then there were three...

Three!

Three trainee instructors.Bip. Bam. Bop. Three. Michael, Steve and Helen

Helen contacted me via my website last week, and I called her back very shortly afterwards.

She's just moved back to Wirral after living in Cambridge and getting some instructor training there. She wasn't sure if she wanted to continue training, and had a lot of questions. I asked her to come along to our session today (now yesterday - the midnight oil has been burning for a couple of hours now)

Because I wanted to involve her right from the off (and the other trainee present, Steve) I sent them out together to do a brief assessment drive. This is something that could easily have backfired. I sent someone I've never met before out on a drive with a man she didn't know. I'd given it all quite a lot of thought in the days before Sunday, and had planned to leave Steve at the car park, and take her out myself, before getting Steve to duplicate the exercise with me sitting in the back watching, but it somehow came out wrong, and it happened otherwise.

And it turned out to be serendipitous, largely due to Steve's natural affinity for the role. His instructions were clear. He was able to answer her questions ably, and the feedback generated from this drive will have bolstered Steve's confidence. Steve's assessment of her driving was positive also, and this has helped Helen to feel more confident about her suitability for the role, and her ability to deal with the tests that will lie in front of her if she ultimately decides to pursue this career.

There is work to be done here. Steve is already a professional driver (of buses and coaches) Helen lacks confidence, and her driving will need some work to get her to the standard required to get her through her advanced driving test.

Helen brackets Steve and Michael. Steve is a very good fit for the role. Michael is the squarest of pegs attempting to mould himself into a round hole. Helen is somewhere in the middle.

And for now, this role of instructor is not as profitable as my usual line of work, but it adds diversity, and I'm thoroughly enjoying doing it. I'm charging far less than most, if not all training organisations, and the £30 that Steve gives me for my 4 hours work is far less than the usual £24/hour I charge. But what if ten people are giving me £30 for that time? If it gets to that point, then I will employ another qualified instructor, and pay them for the time they're spending at my beck and call, but if I give them £100, I end up with £200 for 4 hours work.

That's where I plan to be in a year or two. Or less. It might well be worth paying Google, and/or my web guy some serious money to make this happen.

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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!

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Teaching teachers.

To get the best out of people, you need to be able to do a range of things.

You need to be able to earn their respect if they're going to listen to you; and that means that sometimes, there has to be a degree of assertiveness in there.

In a sense, to be a driving instructor is to be a salesman. Not in the obvious small businessman sense of running your own small trader self employed business, but because you're selling ideas.

Much of what I teach is counter-intuitive, and I've sometimes had to fight my pupils to convince them that what I'm trying to teach them is correct. If you're not a driving instructor or a learner driver (people who've been driving for a while forget), then something as obvious as "you should look where you're going" makes no sense. To a learner, the place to look is to the right, to see what's coming. To me, it doesn't matter what's coming, if you haven't put yourself in the right place, at the right speed, in the right gear, with the wheels turned to the right place, and with your feet in the right place to make the car go, when you do look right, and find that you have a space to move in to.

Occasionally this job is downright dangerous, although probably less than you'd imagine. The one thing that really causes a problem is panic ---> Slam on the brakes. That's the one thing I can't prevent. So far, I've never been rear-ended because of it, although there have been a few close calls. The accidents I have had have almost always been due to other people going into the back of my car because they're looking right, instead of looking where they're going. Didn't their instructors teach them about it?

Instinct is sometimes far inferior to intellect, and to convince my clients of it, I sometimes need to incorporate a bit of steel.

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. I tried unsuccessfully to train someone from scratch to be an instructor, but it didn't happen. If I'd done things differently, it might have been different, and i've gnawed upon that particular bone for a good few hours over the last few months. I made mistakes, and destroyed my client's confidence. Why wouldn't I? I'd never done it before, and if I'm going to branch out from the role of teacher to that of teacher of teacher of teachers, I'm going to find both transferrable skills, and weaknesses in my methods and knowledge base.

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.

My job though, to get him through his teaching test, is to bring out his personality, and to kick away the props, so that he's not totally flummoxed by the first left field question the examiner asks.

To give him some idea, I want to get him to sit in on some lessons, just to see how fluid things are, and how the specifics are both vital and irrelevent. I need to know the specifics, but I don't always need to do more than note the deviations.

There's even a bit of deviousness, of dishonesty going on here. He thinks he's learning from me. In fact, I'm learning from him at the same time. It takes me back a decade. When I first started doing this job, I was doing the same thing with my pupils. Getting paid to learn. I still am to some extent. The day I stop doing so is the day I stop becoming a better instructor.

Respect, by the way, to Simon Cowell. While the other judges were making the ostensibly benign decision to put this guy through to the next round, so that the public could take the piss twice, he was equally ostensibly making the villainous decision to put him out of his misery.

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How to let someone down gently?

Today, an enquiry came through to my inbox from my website.

The enquirer wanted help with driving instructor training. I gave him a call, and quickly, some little alarm bells started ringing.

A monotone voice, a long winded attention to unimportant details, and a certain social ineptness, and total unawareness of that ineptness.

This person had been ditched by his previous trainer, because he phoned them on Christmas day to ask them a question. The trainer was not at all impressed by this, and told him in no uncertain terms where to stick his question, and any further training. This, my enquirer thought, was completely out of order.

Still, I have a two hour session with this person on Sunday, and will do my best to offer insights, advice, and to make him better at what he does.

When I eventually managed to get off the phone, I did a google search for him, and found that he's famous in a way. He did one of those so monumentally awful X factor appearences that the judges put him through to the next round so that they could take the piss out of him twice.

I suspect this person may have an autistic spectrum disorder, and that no matter how much work is put in, and how much money he spends, he's not going to be able to get through the tests, and quite rightly too.

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