The post about my most recent test pass got me thinking. You see, when you do this job you meet all kinds of people – and lots of them – so you build up 
a sort of statistical image of people in general. There is one small group that causes the most grief for me as an instructor, and it’s the one which has its emotions very near the surface and ready to bubble over at the slightest prompt.
This over-emotional group – however small it may be overall – does seem to consist mainly of… women. There, I’ve said it. And it’s simply a statement of fact.
Having said that, I do care what pupils think, and on the relatively rare occasions when one of them breaks down in tears I’m always worried that it might be due to something I’ve said or done. Of course, technically it always IS something I’ve said or done, because if they weren’t in the car with me in the first place then they probably wouldn’t be crying. But I’m a scientist, and I’m logical enough to be able to work out whether something really is my fault or not, so I don’t worry for too long over it.
In one extreme case some years ago I had a German pupil. Right from the start she came over as loud, confident, and full of herself. She didn’t like having any sort of fault pointed out at the best of times (when you get someone like that, you wonder why they’re paying for bloody lessons in the first place), but sometimes she’d get in the car and her eyes would already be red from crying. On those lessons she was a liability. She’d be flinging the car round corners without any thought for what might be coming the other way, and clutch control was out of the window. At these times you just couldn’t talk to her without her either getting angry or bursting into tears (sometimes both). I worked out that this happened every month – like clockwork.
Now, the $64,000 question is: what does an insignificant male do in these situations? It’s a complete no-win scenario when someone is so emotionally unstable, because if you bottle it and don’t pick up their faults they’ll accuse you of ripping them off, and if you do pick up their faults they’re in tears. If they leave you, you can bet your bottom dollar that their next instructor will be told that you were “always shouting at them”. A mere male doesn’t have the option to put his arms around someone (not without ending up on the front page of The Sun, anyway), and this is even less of an option when you’re dealing with someone who was probably a founder member of the militant wing of the Teutonic Women’s Liberation Front. You can’t “identify” the cause, even though both of you know damned well what the cause is (that would get you on the TV as well as in the papers).
Men – especially driving instructors – are programmed to give advice whether people want it or not, whereas women are programmed to reject all advice by default, especially if it’s from a man. Women also have the additional option of tearing the man’s liver out if they’re in a bad mood over something when he offers his advice. I gather it’s got something to do with wanting “empathy”, but it’s bloody hard to sit there nodding empathetically when your life is flashing before your eyes as some maniac with messed up biochemistry is taking every corner on two wheels.
The famous statement that you can’t please all of the people all of the time was never more apt, and I’d go so far as to add that you can’t please some of the people any of the time.
The German woman was an extreme case, but pupils crying when they have made even the smallest mistake isn’t that uncommon. One recent pass of mine had a habit of doing it, even up to the last lesson before her test. With her, it was a fine balance between anger and tearfulness (it usually started with the tears, followed by the anger), but the problem was still as difficult to manage for me. I mean, what can you say or do? It was only on the way back from her test that she confessed that she cries whenever something goes wrong for her. Feeling on safer ground this time (she was, after all, holding her Pass Certificate and wearing a big shiny smile) I commented that whenever it happened I always got the impression that she was blaming me for something. I was slightly put out that she didn’t deny this as emphatically as I would have liked, but this defensiveness is another aspect of the problem.
Another example from several years ago involved a young girl. She was a great driver, but she was also a serial test failer (six times, and always for something different – in fact, she was the one whose mother said to her just before a test “now remember what we told you, Sarah: drive SLOWLY everywhere”, and within 2 minutes of us moving off she applied this when joining a busy dual carriageway). After each of her test fails the volume of tears she cried as she rested her head against the window all the way home must have rusted the door panels on my car.
A current pupil has her test coming up, and I have no real worries because she is also a good driver. However, a few days ago she made a couple of small mistakes during a manoeuvre and suddenly was in tears. As usual I felt terrible, but to be fair to her she was strangely upbeat about it (this is another thing the male of the species can’t understand: how the waterworks seem to be able to be turned on and off at will). We discussed it on the next lesson and she told me that a few days later her husband told her that the firemen dealing with the Australian bushfires had been feeding water to Koalas, which made her break down again! What the hell can you (as a man) do in situations like this?
I think that in many cases it has a lot to do with upbringing. Somehow, I can’t imagine that the typical Iron Age woman burst into tears over insignificant details – if she had, we’d all be extinct by now. The problem with many youngsters is that they’ve been mollycoddled for 17 years and they simply don’t know how to handle any sort of failure, however small it may be. With many of them, crying is a form of emotional blackmail that they’ve grown up using because – certainly with mummy and daddy – it has always paid dividends. In the adult world, though, it often doesn’t get them what they want.