Look out! Advanced observations for the uninitiated...
Discussion
I said I'd post some stuff once the new book was out, so here's a post on the issue which causes more road accidents than anything else in the UK:
44% of all road accidents are caused by drivers not looking properly.
How can this be possible? How can almost half of drivers who crash not be looking properly? Looking is surely the one thing we should all be doing all the time when we’re driving?
You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? But of course, life is never that simple, so here are my tips for avoiding being involved in an accident due to someone simply not looking properly.
Firstly, CONCENTRATE. Can you remember how much you had to concentrate when you first started driving? The simple actions involved in pressing the brake, turning the steering wheel and moving the gearlever took up pretty much all of your mental capacity. In fact, whilst you were concentrating on operating the controls, your instructor was watching the traffic and looking out for hazards on the road on your behalf.
But, with practice and experience, you probably found that you had to think less and less about controlling the car – setting off, changing gear and steering became almost second nature and you could almost carry out those simple actions without thinking about them at all. For a learner, this is the point where they can start to really concentrate on what’s happening outside the car – where to look, how to approach hazards, how fast (or slow) to drive, what’s next…
As drivers develop, pass their test and gain experience, that “second nature” mentality starts to creep into every aspect of their driving. As well as giving less and less thought to operating the car’s controls, they give less and less thought to how they approach junctions, vehicles and other hazards.
Driving becomes “routine” – something we do without giving it too much thought, much like many other things that we’ve done a thousand times before. Making a cup of tea, having a shower, vacuuming the carpet, sending a text – these are all actions that at one time or another we’ve had to learn and concentrate on, but over time we’ve become able to do them almost automatically without thinking.
Have you ever driven to work, or to the supermarket, or to somewhere else you drive to regularly and had absolutely no recollection of the journey? Did you drive through a red light? Did you cut someone up in traffic? Can you remember if you locked your car? It’s very common to forget the details of journeys if you’re not concentrating on your driving.
The reason you can’t remember your journey is that you’re thinking about other things – what have you got on at work today? What shopping do you need? What shall we have for tea? You’re thinking about other things all the time, because driving doesn’t really take up much of your mental capacity
The difference between making tea or having a shower and driving a car is that showering and tea making don’t involve moving a ton and a half of metal at speed along a road populated by idiots in other lumps of metal also travelling at speed with cyclists, child pedestrians, animals and tractors thrown into the mix.
There are far more risks involved in driving than almost all our other daily tasks combined, but because we generally arrive at our destinations unscathed and undamaged, we don’t consider those risks and we habitually lose concentration when driving.
So how do you improve your concentration?
Firstly, remember what you’re doing. Don’t let your mind wander too far from the fact that you’re driving a car at speed in a potentially very dangerous environment. I know you might have had a bad day at work, your partner is mad with you, the kids are screaming on the back seat, you’re worried about an unexpected bill, you’re wondering what to wear tonight and your dog’s been taken ill, but it’s important to set these things aside when you get into the drivers seat.
Try this – if you’ve got a thousand things going on in your head, instead of getting in to the car, putting your seatbelt on, sticking the key in the ignition and going for first gear, try just getting into the car, shutting the door and sitting there for a few seconds – no more than 5 or 10 seconds is enough. Take that time to gather your thoughts, set your other issues aside and remind yourself you’re about to drive a car and it’ll need your full attention.
Be curious and use your imagination. Look at every junction or hazard and imagine what might go wrong. Could a car pull out on you? Might a child run out from behind those parked cars? Could that wobbly cyclist fall off in front of you? If you start to imagine what might happen, your predictions will sometimes come true! The car will pull out, the child will run out and the wobbly cyclist will fall off. Instead of being surprised by these things going wrong, if you’ve imagined them happening, you’ll be prepared and you’ll be much less likely to have an accident.
Tied in with using your imagination is the skill of making driving plans. Once you’ve started imagining what might happen, you can build on this skill by planning what you should do if those things happen. So, if that car does pull out in front of you, you’ll brake and steer round it. If a child does run out from behind the parked cars, you’ll brake and avoid them. If the wobbly cyclist does fall off, you’ll avoid hitting them (once you’ve stopped laughing, of course).
Using your imagination and making driving plans will hugely improve your ability to maintain a good level of concentration even on your most mundane, everyday journeys.
On longer journeys, it’s easy to let your concentration slip, particularly if you’re travelling for several hours on motorways, which can be quite monotonous. Take regular breaks, keep hydrated, make sure you eat regularly so that your blood sugar doesn’t drop too low and have a rest, preferably away from the car, if you start feeling tired.
How do you look?
No, I don’t mean how does your hair look? Or do those shoes go with that skirt? Or does your bum look big?
I mean, how do you look down the road and around you when you’re driving? It sounds like a pretty stupid question to start with (I look down the road – what else is there to say?), but there’s actually a lot more to it than you might think.
Firstly, you need to understand that your eyes work in a specific way – and it’s not a way which is always well suited to driving a car or riding a motorbike. As you read this post, you’re looking straight ahead at the screen, and you also have a wide field of view of everything else around you – you may be looking at the screen, but you can also see the rest of the room, or the other people on the train, or the beach and the sea (lucky sod!) to the left and right, above and below the screen you’re actually looking at. This is commonly referred to as your peripheral vision.
But peripheral vision isn’t really as good as you might think it is. Try this little exercise - keep looking at this paragraph and reading these words, and at the same time, try to pick out some detail of your surrounding area without taking your eyes off the words.
Try to pick out what that movement is through the window, or what the passenger next to you is wearing, or how many people are swimming in the sea (lucky sod!). It’s not possible to make out that level of detail in your peripheral vision.
You might be able to make out some movement, or some basic colours or shapes, but if you’re not looking directly at something, your peripheral vision only really gives a visual “frame” to the detail that you’re looking directly at.
Let’s move that little exercise on a little and make it more focussed. Keep looking at these words, but try to read the words in the paragraph below, without taking your eyes off these words. It’s still not possible is it? You can make out words and spaces and paragraphs, but you can’t actually read the words, can you?
Now try it with the line below. Look at the words on this line, but try to read the line directly below. Now it’s just about getting possible to make out letters and words, but it’s still not easy to read in this way – let’s face it, you need to be looking directly at the words to be able to read them properly. But how small are the words? Compared with your field of vision, they’re tiny, so although we feel like we’ve got a nice, wide field of vision, we can only actually look at detail in a very narrow area right in the centre of our field of vision. Right where we’re actually looking at the time, in fact.
Over millions of years, our bodies have developed strategies to deal with this limitation in our vision. Try this little exercise – sit opposite a friend (it’s better with a friend, as strangers give you a funny look if you ask them to do it), and ask them to stare at your right eye and then your left eye, and then keep switching between your left and right eye every second or so. Watch their eyes as they look from left to right – they flick, very quickly in an almost insect-like manner.
Then try the same exercise, but this time with yourself in the mirror. You’ll look from eye to eye, but you won’t notice the flicking motion at all – our brains have evolved to ignore the blur when your eyes are moving, and focus only when your eyes are stationary, in between the “flicks”. Even if you try to look smoothly from left to right in a long arc, your eyes are actually flicking and stopping, flicking and stopping constantly, but because your brain ignores the flicking, it’ll look to you as though you’re just smoothly moving your eyes from left to right in one movement.
So, we can only focus on detail in a very small part of our field of vision, but our eyes compensate by flicking about at high speed and allowing us to focus in detail on lots of things in a short space of time. If you were going to design eyes from scratch for driving, they wouldn’t be like that, would they? I can’t imagine Google or Tesla or whoever else is developing driverless cars have designed limited field, flicky cameras. I imagine they’re developing cameras which constantly monitor everything that’s happening 360° around the car at all times. A camera like this won’t miss anything, and won’t be looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. It is, for want of a better expression, an all seeing eye.
The All Seeing Eye
So, obviously, we’re biologically limited and we’re not going to evolve 360° HD eyes any time soon, so how do we make the best of what we’ve got? How do we train ourselves to use our eyes as though they are 360° HD cameras? It’s not as difficult as you might think.
Firstly, when you’re looking along the road, you should try to develop a system for where to look. My system is:
Far Distance
Middle Distance
Near Distance
Sides
Rear
So let’s go through each of those in turn and see how it works.
Far Distance I start by looking as far ahead as it’s possible to see. On some roads, this can be right up to the horizon, and on others your view will be more limited – perhaps a few hundred yards at most. Starting in the far distance allows you to build a mental picture of where the road is going and what hazards you’re likely to encounter further down the road.
Middle Distance I hesitate to set an actual distance on this – the middle distance can vary as much as the far distance can, but in practice, it’s usually halfway between you and the far distance. Looking into the middle distance allows you to see and plan for hazards which you’ll encounter next. In other words, you’ll be looking at the hazards you’ll be dealing with after the one you’re currently dealing with.
Near Distance This is the stuff immediately in front of you – the stuff you’re actually driving round or through at the present time. The cyclist you’re passing, the corner you’re driving round, the roundabout you’re on or the pedestrian crossing you’re stopping at.
Sides Without teaching you to suck eggs too much, this is the stuff that’s happening either side of you, alongside you, in your “blind” spots, and over your shoulders. If you’re keeping good observations, things alongside you shouldn’t take you by surprise.
Rear Centre mirror, side mirrors and occasional shoulder checks should allow you to keep a good, clear picture of everything that’s going on behind you, but I don’t just mean the occasional glance behind – you need to employ a similar technique to when you’re looking forwards – a mirror check should start in the far distance, then move to the middle and near distances.
Scanning When you’re practising this “all seeing eye” technique, try to combine it with another technique, referred to as scanning. Scanning is a continual visual “sweep”, whereby you continually move your eyes around, picking out potentially hazardous situations which might cause you problems as you approach them. Let’s use a line of parked cars as an example:
Start by looking in the far distance to see if there are any cars approaching from the opposite direction which you might need to give priority to.
Then look along the line of parked cars to see if any have brake lights on, doors closing/opening, indicators or any other little clues that cars might be moving off or doors opening into your path.
As you pass the parked cars, keep a look out for movements of feet underneath the cars you’re passing which might be someone about to cross the road.
Check to the sides for cyclists or other hazards, and check your mirrors for vehicles approaching from behind.
Use the same approach at junctions – don’t just take a quick glance left and right – a quick glance will not allow you to take in enough detail. Instead, use the all seeing eye approach, take a second longer to look far, mid and near distance. A slightly longer scan will allow you to better assess the speed of approaching vehicles and you’ll be far less likely to miss more vulnerable road users such as cyclists or motorcyclists.
Your eyes should never be still when you’re driving – if you stare at something for too long, you’ll exclude all the other hazards from your driving plans and you’re far more likely to miss something important and make a mistake which could lead to an accident.
Other Drivers
Improving your own observation skills is all well and good, but what about everyone else? 44% of them aren’t looking properly, so even if you’re doing everything right, how do you protect yourself from all the other blind idiots out there?
Start by assuming that no-one has seen you. If you keep at the back of your mind, the possibility that any of the other road users out there may pull out on you. Swerve into your lane or step out in front of you, then you’ll always have a plan in mind to help you avoid an accident.
When you see another vehicle waiting in a junction, check to see whether the driver has looked in your direction. At the same time, keep an eye out for whether their wheels are stationary or moving, and whether their brake lights (if they’re visible) are on or off, or – even worse – have just gone off.
If you spot a car waiting in a junction and the driver isn’t looking in your direction, the brake lights go off and the wheels start to turn, there’s a better-than-good chance that they’re about to pull out in front of you, so lift off the accelerator, move towards the centre line and be ready to brake.
And consider sounding your horn.
Horn use isn’t always appropriate – if you blast your horn after someone has already pulled out, for instance, there’s a chance they may panic and stop right in your path and make a bad situation worse.
If, however, you’re picking up clues that a car might pull into your path because the driver hasn’t seen you, then a horn warning can be a good idea. Give a short blast on the horn and look for a reaction from the driver. They may hit the brakes, look in your direction or flick you a middle finger. It doesn’t really matter – all that matters is that they have seen you and you’ve prevented them from pulling out by getting their attention.
Horns are extremely misused these days, but this is an example of how to use one correctly.
So there you go – concentrate, learn how to look and assume no-one has seen you. Easy!
Don’t be one of the 44%!
44% of all road accidents are caused by drivers not looking properly.
How can this be possible? How can almost half of drivers who crash not be looking properly? Looking is surely the one thing we should all be doing all the time when we’re driving?
You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? But of course, life is never that simple, so here are my tips for avoiding being involved in an accident due to someone simply not looking properly.
Firstly, CONCENTRATE. Can you remember how much you had to concentrate when you first started driving? The simple actions involved in pressing the brake, turning the steering wheel and moving the gearlever took up pretty much all of your mental capacity. In fact, whilst you were concentrating on operating the controls, your instructor was watching the traffic and looking out for hazards on the road on your behalf.
But, with practice and experience, you probably found that you had to think less and less about controlling the car – setting off, changing gear and steering became almost second nature and you could almost carry out those simple actions without thinking about them at all. For a learner, this is the point where they can start to really concentrate on what’s happening outside the car – where to look, how to approach hazards, how fast (or slow) to drive, what’s next…
As drivers develop, pass their test and gain experience, that “second nature” mentality starts to creep into every aspect of their driving. As well as giving less and less thought to operating the car’s controls, they give less and less thought to how they approach junctions, vehicles and other hazards.
Driving becomes “routine” – something we do without giving it too much thought, much like many other things that we’ve done a thousand times before. Making a cup of tea, having a shower, vacuuming the carpet, sending a text – these are all actions that at one time or another we’ve had to learn and concentrate on, but over time we’ve become able to do them almost automatically without thinking.
Have you ever driven to work, or to the supermarket, or to somewhere else you drive to regularly and had absolutely no recollection of the journey? Did you drive through a red light? Did you cut someone up in traffic? Can you remember if you locked your car? It’s very common to forget the details of journeys if you’re not concentrating on your driving.
The reason you can’t remember your journey is that you’re thinking about other things – what have you got on at work today? What shopping do you need? What shall we have for tea? You’re thinking about other things all the time, because driving doesn’t really take up much of your mental capacity
The difference between making tea or having a shower and driving a car is that showering and tea making don’t involve moving a ton and a half of metal at speed along a road populated by idiots in other lumps of metal also travelling at speed with cyclists, child pedestrians, animals and tractors thrown into the mix.
There are far more risks involved in driving than almost all our other daily tasks combined, but because we generally arrive at our destinations unscathed and undamaged, we don’t consider those risks and we habitually lose concentration when driving.
So how do you improve your concentration?
Firstly, remember what you’re doing. Don’t let your mind wander too far from the fact that you’re driving a car at speed in a potentially very dangerous environment. I know you might have had a bad day at work, your partner is mad with you, the kids are screaming on the back seat, you’re worried about an unexpected bill, you’re wondering what to wear tonight and your dog’s been taken ill, but it’s important to set these things aside when you get into the drivers seat.
Try this – if you’ve got a thousand things going on in your head, instead of getting in to the car, putting your seatbelt on, sticking the key in the ignition and going for first gear, try just getting into the car, shutting the door and sitting there for a few seconds – no more than 5 or 10 seconds is enough. Take that time to gather your thoughts, set your other issues aside and remind yourself you’re about to drive a car and it’ll need your full attention.
Be curious and use your imagination. Look at every junction or hazard and imagine what might go wrong. Could a car pull out on you? Might a child run out from behind those parked cars? Could that wobbly cyclist fall off in front of you? If you start to imagine what might happen, your predictions will sometimes come true! The car will pull out, the child will run out and the wobbly cyclist will fall off. Instead of being surprised by these things going wrong, if you’ve imagined them happening, you’ll be prepared and you’ll be much less likely to have an accident.
Tied in with using your imagination is the skill of making driving plans. Once you’ve started imagining what might happen, you can build on this skill by planning what you should do if those things happen. So, if that car does pull out in front of you, you’ll brake and steer round it. If a child does run out from behind the parked cars, you’ll brake and avoid them. If the wobbly cyclist does fall off, you’ll avoid hitting them (once you’ve stopped laughing, of course).
Using your imagination and making driving plans will hugely improve your ability to maintain a good level of concentration even on your most mundane, everyday journeys.
On longer journeys, it’s easy to let your concentration slip, particularly if you’re travelling for several hours on motorways, which can be quite monotonous. Take regular breaks, keep hydrated, make sure you eat regularly so that your blood sugar doesn’t drop too low and have a rest, preferably away from the car, if you start feeling tired.
How do you look?
No, I don’t mean how does your hair look? Or do those shoes go with that skirt? Or does your bum look big?
I mean, how do you look down the road and around you when you’re driving? It sounds like a pretty stupid question to start with (I look down the road – what else is there to say?), but there’s actually a lot more to it than you might think.
Firstly, you need to understand that your eyes work in a specific way – and it’s not a way which is always well suited to driving a car or riding a motorbike. As you read this post, you’re looking straight ahead at the screen, and you also have a wide field of view of everything else around you – you may be looking at the screen, but you can also see the rest of the room, or the other people on the train, or the beach and the sea (lucky sod!) to the left and right, above and below the screen you’re actually looking at. This is commonly referred to as your peripheral vision.
But peripheral vision isn’t really as good as you might think it is. Try this little exercise - keep looking at this paragraph and reading these words, and at the same time, try to pick out some detail of your surrounding area without taking your eyes off the words.
Try to pick out what that movement is through the window, or what the passenger next to you is wearing, or how many people are swimming in the sea (lucky sod!). It’s not possible to make out that level of detail in your peripheral vision.
You might be able to make out some movement, or some basic colours or shapes, but if you’re not looking directly at something, your peripheral vision only really gives a visual “frame” to the detail that you’re looking directly at.
Let’s move that little exercise on a little and make it more focussed. Keep looking at these words, but try to read the words in the paragraph below, without taking your eyes off these words. It’s still not possible is it? You can make out words and spaces and paragraphs, but you can’t actually read the words, can you?
Now try it with the line below. Look at the words on this line, but try to read the line directly below. Now it’s just about getting possible to make out letters and words, but it’s still not easy to read in this way – let’s face it, you need to be looking directly at the words to be able to read them properly. But how small are the words? Compared with your field of vision, they’re tiny, so although we feel like we’ve got a nice, wide field of vision, we can only actually look at detail in a very narrow area right in the centre of our field of vision. Right where we’re actually looking at the time, in fact.
Over millions of years, our bodies have developed strategies to deal with this limitation in our vision. Try this little exercise – sit opposite a friend (it’s better with a friend, as strangers give you a funny look if you ask them to do it), and ask them to stare at your right eye and then your left eye, and then keep switching between your left and right eye every second or so. Watch their eyes as they look from left to right – they flick, very quickly in an almost insect-like manner.
Then try the same exercise, but this time with yourself in the mirror. You’ll look from eye to eye, but you won’t notice the flicking motion at all – our brains have evolved to ignore the blur when your eyes are moving, and focus only when your eyes are stationary, in between the “flicks”. Even if you try to look smoothly from left to right in a long arc, your eyes are actually flicking and stopping, flicking and stopping constantly, but because your brain ignores the flicking, it’ll look to you as though you’re just smoothly moving your eyes from left to right in one movement.
So, we can only focus on detail in a very small part of our field of vision, but our eyes compensate by flicking about at high speed and allowing us to focus in detail on lots of things in a short space of time. If you were going to design eyes from scratch for driving, they wouldn’t be like that, would they? I can’t imagine Google or Tesla or whoever else is developing driverless cars have designed limited field, flicky cameras. I imagine they’re developing cameras which constantly monitor everything that’s happening 360° around the car at all times. A camera like this won’t miss anything, and won’t be looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. It is, for want of a better expression, an all seeing eye.
The All Seeing Eye
So, obviously, we’re biologically limited and we’re not going to evolve 360° HD eyes any time soon, so how do we make the best of what we’ve got? How do we train ourselves to use our eyes as though they are 360° HD cameras? It’s not as difficult as you might think.
Firstly, when you’re looking along the road, you should try to develop a system for where to look. My system is:
Far Distance
Middle Distance
Near Distance
Sides
Rear
So let’s go through each of those in turn and see how it works.
Far Distance I start by looking as far ahead as it’s possible to see. On some roads, this can be right up to the horizon, and on others your view will be more limited – perhaps a few hundred yards at most. Starting in the far distance allows you to build a mental picture of where the road is going and what hazards you’re likely to encounter further down the road.
Middle Distance I hesitate to set an actual distance on this – the middle distance can vary as much as the far distance can, but in practice, it’s usually halfway between you and the far distance. Looking into the middle distance allows you to see and plan for hazards which you’ll encounter next. In other words, you’ll be looking at the hazards you’ll be dealing with after the one you’re currently dealing with.
Near Distance This is the stuff immediately in front of you – the stuff you’re actually driving round or through at the present time. The cyclist you’re passing, the corner you’re driving round, the roundabout you’re on or the pedestrian crossing you’re stopping at.
Sides Without teaching you to suck eggs too much, this is the stuff that’s happening either side of you, alongside you, in your “blind” spots, and over your shoulders. If you’re keeping good observations, things alongside you shouldn’t take you by surprise.
Rear Centre mirror, side mirrors and occasional shoulder checks should allow you to keep a good, clear picture of everything that’s going on behind you, but I don’t just mean the occasional glance behind – you need to employ a similar technique to when you’re looking forwards – a mirror check should start in the far distance, then move to the middle and near distances.
Scanning When you’re practising this “all seeing eye” technique, try to combine it with another technique, referred to as scanning. Scanning is a continual visual “sweep”, whereby you continually move your eyes around, picking out potentially hazardous situations which might cause you problems as you approach them. Let’s use a line of parked cars as an example:
Start by looking in the far distance to see if there are any cars approaching from the opposite direction which you might need to give priority to.
Then look along the line of parked cars to see if any have brake lights on, doors closing/opening, indicators or any other little clues that cars might be moving off or doors opening into your path.
As you pass the parked cars, keep a look out for movements of feet underneath the cars you’re passing which might be someone about to cross the road.
Check to the sides for cyclists or other hazards, and check your mirrors for vehicles approaching from behind.
Use the same approach at junctions – don’t just take a quick glance left and right – a quick glance will not allow you to take in enough detail. Instead, use the all seeing eye approach, take a second longer to look far, mid and near distance. A slightly longer scan will allow you to better assess the speed of approaching vehicles and you’ll be far less likely to miss more vulnerable road users such as cyclists or motorcyclists.
Your eyes should never be still when you’re driving – if you stare at something for too long, you’ll exclude all the other hazards from your driving plans and you’re far more likely to miss something important and make a mistake which could lead to an accident.
Other Drivers
Improving your own observation skills is all well and good, but what about everyone else? 44% of them aren’t looking properly, so even if you’re doing everything right, how do you protect yourself from all the other blind idiots out there?
Start by assuming that no-one has seen you. If you keep at the back of your mind, the possibility that any of the other road users out there may pull out on you. Swerve into your lane or step out in front of you, then you’ll always have a plan in mind to help you avoid an accident.
When you see another vehicle waiting in a junction, check to see whether the driver has looked in your direction. At the same time, keep an eye out for whether their wheels are stationary or moving, and whether their brake lights (if they’re visible) are on or off, or – even worse – have just gone off.
If you spot a car waiting in a junction and the driver isn’t looking in your direction, the brake lights go off and the wheels start to turn, there’s a better-than-good chance that they’re about to pull out in front of you, so lift off the accelerator, move towards the centre line and be ready to brake.
And consider sounding your horn.
Horn use isn’t always appropriate – if you blast your horn after someone has already pulled out, for instance, there’s a chance they may panic and stop right in your path and make a bad situation worse.
If, however, you’re picking up clues that a car might pull into your path because the driver hasn’t seen you, then a horn warning can be a good idea. Give a short blast on the horn and look for a reaction from the driver. They may hit the brakes, look in your direction or flick you a middle finger. It doesn’t really matter – all that matters is that they have seen you and you’ve prevented them from pulling out by getting their attention.
Horns are extremely misused these days, but this is an example of how to use one correctly.
So there you go – concentrate, learn how to look and assume no-one has seen you. Easy!
Don’t be one of the 44%!
Edited by Reg Local on Monday 25th April 17:33
It sounds very much to me as though your student isn't ready to be left "on their own" yet.
Have a read of this old thread - particularly the section on the four stages of competence:
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
Your student sounds as though they are still pretty much at stage 1 (unconscious incompetence) and are only just starting to move a little towards stage 2 (conscious incompetence).
It's your job as an instructor/supervisor to get to know your student and to give them clear and straightforward instructions in plenty of time for pretty much every action they need to carry out at this stage, whilst also keeping an eye on all the other hazards & traffic.
Or as I put it to my students "I'll be doing all the driving for now. You'll be sitting in the driving seat, pressing the pedals and turning the wheel, but I'll actually be doing all the driving until you start to get the hang of it".
As their experience grows, the amount of thought required to simply move the car along the road will decrease, and they will slowly start to develop some "spare capacity" which they can apply to traffic, hazards and planning. For now though, you'll have to provide the spare capacity whilst they get the hang of the controls.
As their experience increases, look for the positives - when they get a junction right, or move off without stalling, remind them next time they're in a similar situation - "remember what you did last time? Do it the same this time."
They'll get there in the end. But you'll have to do most of the thinking for the time being.
Have a read of this old thread - particularly the section on the four stages of competence:
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
Your student sounds as though they are still pretty much at stage 1 (unconscious incompetence) and are only just starting to move a little towards stage 2 (conscious incompetence).
It's your job as an instructor/supervisor to get to know your student and to give them clear and straightforward instructions in plenty of time for pretty much every action they need to carry out at this stage, whilst also keeping an eye on all the other hazards & traffic.
Or as I put it to my students "I'll be doing all the driving for now. You'll be sitting in the driving seat, pressing the pedals and turning the wheel, but I'll actually be doing all the driving until you start to get the hang of it".
As their experience grows, the amount of thought required to simply move the car along the road will decrease, and they will slowly start to develop some "spare capacity" which they can apply to traffic, hazards and planning. For now though, you'll have to provide the spare capacity whilst they get the hang of the controls.
As their experience increases, look for the positives - when they get a junction right, or move off without stalling, remind them next time they're in a similar situation - "remember what you did last time? Do it the same this time."
They'll get there in the end. But you'll have to do most of the thinking for the time being.
Dr Mike Oxgreen said:
WJNB said:
Crikey how I hate being on the road in the company of the sort of person who writes books & pontificates about how to drive well. Most become self-policing driving in such an exaggerated overly-careful tentative way as if lecturing us.
Possibly the stupidest thing I've ever read on PH, and that's with substantial competition. Well done you!Even idiots.
Gassing Station | Advanced Driving | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff