by driving2day » Sat Jun 02, 2012 5:21 pm
I've had a few lessons since my last post which I wish I had updated as I went along but my monitor is working and right now I'm focusing on paying for driving lessons.
The check test was a good experience in that I made extremely silly mistakes. I was not nervous at all, not even a tiny bit. Not butterflies in stomach or anything, as I knew it was for my instructor, but I feel having a 3rd person in the car affected me without me realising physically.
For example, I would be at the wrong gear when at certain roundabouts. I was at a traffic light, when it turned green I carried on driving thinking of driving ahead, and not noticing the car in front of me was breaking to turn right. Normally I would have noticed and stopped.
There were a few other really silly mistakes but I guess I realised how even without nerves another person may affect you and perhaps this is what happens in driving tests.
My instructor set the lesson to focus on roundabouts and the feedback she was given (one of them) was to perhaps let the student get on with the roundabout and not prompt too much. She said to me that she would do that but she doesn't want to put us in danger either. I understood that and agreed at the time but I think I more agree with the examiner now.
The next lesson we focused on right turns on roundabouts which I did fine on my own after practising. Then we mixed them up, but I messed up when we started doing straight.
What I have noticed from that time and the lessons after is that sometimes I feel my own judgement is better. Not always, but I get nervous with oncoming cars. I used to hate being in the middle of the road at traffic lights waiting to turn right whilst other cars pass me for that very reason, but now I am fine with it. I used to hate joining a road but even that I am better with. However, with roundabouts, I have this huge fear of the cars (especially lorries) coming from the right. I feel I can't judge their speed as each car varies.
I also feel my instructor doesn't always judge correctly. For example once she told e to go, when I was wanting to slow down as I felt the car on the right was fast approaching, and we had to suddenly break before joining he roundabout which made the car stick out, because the instructor's judgement was incorrect. This has happened more times than I would have liked, which makes me feel like I am going a step backwards.
Another time there was a lorry which was close so we let it pass, then another lorry was approaching and I was meant to be turning right, so I joined the roundabout upon the instruction of the instructor, the lorry was right behind and I didn't manage to get to the right lane really fast, so felt like I was in a real muddle. I'd much rather have waited for that lorry to go then on the roundabout. Would that be hesitation in a test, resulting in a fail?
I know at times I make mistakes myself, but I would much rather be safe on a roundabout and stay back so I am more careful there. Last week I decided to watch some roundabout videos and felt better in tackling them mentally, but when it got to the lesson we hardly did roundabouts and focused on manoeuvres which at this point I am completely fine with.
I don't know, but the last 2 or 3 lessons I feel like instead of feeling more positive about roundabouts, I feel more frightened and this is because of the incorrect judgement of my instructor, which she would say herself, 'yea, that car was coming slightly faster than I thought, yea from my side I thought we could go' and so on. I would much rather have been left to my own judgement and stayed back which would not have made me worry about roundabouts more.
I thought of another example. My instructor tells me to look at the wheels of the people coming from the right (normally it's the cars which are the next door people from the right who are going to join the roundabout too) to see where they are going. I don't feel for myself this is a good judgement because I can not tell most of the time. Even with my instructor, sometimes she thinks they are going to the left but instead they come round to in front of me. Once I said, those cars don't seem to be turning left it seems they are coming this way, to which she disagreed and told me to go, but I was right. I don't like to be right in this case because I want to get over my fear, but once I get into a possibly dangerous scenario then it's like I'm hitting a brick wall again. It's like I dislike hearing look at the wheels because the wheels don't tell anything to me most of the time.
That was a long rant, and I don't like to talk about my instructor in this way, but I hate being put on the roundabout when I told feel safe, even when I say no, but I'm told we still have to go, then we either suddenly break and are sticking out onto the roundabout which is in the way of other road drivers, or I'm in a squashed position in the way of other drivers on the roundabout.
Female - learning to drive