The post about my most recent test pass got me thinking. You see, when you do this job you meet all kinds of people \u2013 and lots of them \u2013 so you build up ![\"Tears](\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/clown_tears1.jpg\" "\\"Tears")
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\u2019s the one which has its emotions very near the surface and ready to bubble over at the slightest prompt.<\/p>\n
This over-emotional group \u2013 however small it may be overall \u2013 does seem to consist mainly of\u2026 women. There, I\u2019ve said it. And it\u2019s simply a statement of fact.<\/p>\n
Having said that, I do<\/strong> care what pupils think, and on the relatively rare occasions when one of them breaks down in tears I\u2019m always worried that it might be due to something I\u2019ve said or done. Of course, technically it always IS<\/strong> something I\u2019ve said or done, because if they weren\u2019t in the car with me in the first place then they probably wouldn\u2019t be crying. But I\u2019m a scientist, and I\u2019m logical enough to be able to work out whether something really is my fault or not, so I don\u2019t worry for too long over it.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t like having any sort of fault pointed out at the best of times (when you get someone like that, you wonder why they\u2019re paying for bloody lessons in the first place), but sometimes she\u2019d get in the car and her eyes would already be red from crying. On those lessons she was a liability. She\u2019d 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\u2019t talk to her without her either getting angry or bursting into tears (sometimes both). I worked out that this happened every month<\/strong> \u2013 like clockwork.<\/p>\n Now, the $64,000 question is: what does an insignificant male do in these situations? It\u2019s a complete no-win scenario when someone is so emotionally unstable, because if you bottle it and don\u2019t<\/strong> pick up their faults they\u2019ll accuse you of ripping them off, and if you do<\/strong> pick up their faults they\u2019re in tears. If they leave you, you can bet your bottom dollar that their next instructor will be told that you were \u201calways shouting at them\u201d. A mere male doesn\u2019t 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\u2019re dealing with someone who was probably a founder member of the militant wing of the Teutonic Women\u2019s Liberation Front. You can\u2019t \u201cidentify\u201d 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).<\/p>\n Men \u2013 especially driving instructors \u2013 are programmed to give advice whether people want it or not, whereas women are programmed to reject all<\/strong> advice by default, especially if it\u2019s from a man. Women also have the additional option of tearing the man\u2019s liver out if they\u2019re in a bad mood over something when he offers his advice. I gather it\u2019s got something to do with wanting \u201cempathy\u201d, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The famous statement that you can\u2019t please all of the people all of the time was never more apt, and I\u2019d go so far as to add that you can\u2019t please some of the people any of the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n The German woman was an extreme case, but pupils crying when they have made even the smallest mistake isn\u2019t 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\u2019t deny this as emphatically as I would have liked, but this defensiveness is another aspect of the problem.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 in fact, she was the one whose mother said to her just before a test \u201cnow remember what we told you, Sarah: drive SLOWLY everywhere\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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<\/strong> you (as a man) do in situations like this?<\/p>\n I think that in many cases it has a lot to do with upbringing. Somehow, I can\u2019t imagine that the typical Iron Age woman burst into tears over insignificant details \u2013 if she had, we\u2019d all be extinct by now. The problem with many youngsters is that they\u2019ve been mollycoddled for 17 years and they simply don\u2019t 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\u2019ve grown up using because \u2013 certainly with mummy and daddy \u2013 it has always paid dividends. In the adult world, though, it often doesn\u2019t get them what they want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The post about my most recent test pass got me thinking. You see, when you do this job you meet all kinds of people \u2013 and lots of them \u2013 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,102,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-general-related","category-training"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}