Is driving instructor waisting time on purpose? Or is this reasonable?

[BumbleBeeTreez]

I am learning to drive. I have never had lessons or any practice before. Its in an automatic. I am having 2 hours lessons at a time, twice a week.

After 4 hours we have covered the cockpit drill, starting and stopping the car. On a quite road – starting the car, steering into the road, accelerating slowing and then parking. Revering backwards. Then steering at junctions while instructor controlled the speed with the brake pedal and then revering at a dead end.

He spends a lot of time at the start of the lesson filling in forms – what we did last time, what we want to do this time and how confident I feel with different areas (giving it a number score) and then asking a few theory questions and going off on a few minute rant. This takes atleast 20 minutes (more like 30 minutes) before I even start driving. And then lessons finishes 15 minutes early to fill in another form (what we covered in lesson) and then drops me off at pickup location.

Is this normal? Is this good progress for 4 hours worth of lessons? Or is he trying to waste my time so I have to spend more money on lessons and so he can save petrol?

Thanks for reading

I learnt to drive abiut 6/7 years ago. No its not normal to spend so much of the lesson filling out forms. You should be driving or practicing maneuvers for most of it. Theory stuff you can study at home

He sounds shit. Get another instructor.

I'd take it up with him. Particularly when he goes off on a rant. "While this is all simply fascinating, do you think I might get some driving done today?"

I would consider having 1 hr lessons , sounds like you would get more driving in for your time / money

ds is 18, so recent learner. He spent most of the hour driving.

I think he passed he theroy quite early on, maybe even before he had a lesson, so that may have influenced the balance of drive v. theory.

If all other instructors are booked up, I would raise it with him. Ask him, how many minutes in each lesson would he expect you to be driving? Say that you are concerned that you spend too long while he fills in forms, and also that you don't want to pay for conversations, as time is precious and expensive, so can you stick to conversations about driving only.

I know it is hard to be up front, but if there is no-one else, and you need to learn, stand your ground, and get driving.

It's normal

What helped me improve more quickly with driving was having 2-3 lessons a week rather than weekly lessons. After a week it was like starting again, trying to remember everything!

I would not like all this messing about. I never had any driving lessons from a driving school place. My late Husband was my instructor. This was many years ago.

I had a provisional driving licence, just at the time we were going to live in the USA for three years, so then had to take a USA driving test, which I passed first time. Coming home again, I then had to take a UK driving test after six months, so was successful with that also.

Some of my friends back in the UK, were spending a lot of money on driving lessons, and some of them failing tests quite often, after many driving lessons. so I was glad not to have had and professional lessons myself.

my neighbour is taking lessons, and I noticed (when I was working in the garden, not peering through the curtains) that the instructor arrived about 15 minutes before, parks a couple of houses away, filling in papers, then at 2pm on the dot he knocks on the door, and they drive away within a minute.

My instructors filled in forms about what we had done, what needed improvement, what we we would do next lesson... It took five minutes max, usually after the lesson had finished tbh.

My first driving instructor was like this - also made me drive to his vets and left me parked outside while he went in to book an appointment for his cat. And liked to have a good rant about how he didn’t like women drivers to use the brakes because we all breakers too hard.

My second driving instructor was awesome - first lesson had me driving around north London, parking reversing, traffic lights roundabouts you name it. I was shitting bricks the whole time but I passed my test three months later….

I'd be changing. We never spent more than 5 minutes on this sort of thing when I learned to drive. He's taking the pee.

Not normal in my experience. I passed my test last year and did a small amount of very slow driving within my first hour of driving a manual car. I had a different instructor after a while and he would just go over how my lesson had gone/what I thought I should improve at etc for a few minutes at the end. When I got in the car to start he'd take a few minutes to tell me what we were going to cover that day (sometimes I'd ask for different things if I was particularly worried about one thing), what I should be trying to focus on from last week. Certainly nothing like half an hour! We used to chat a lot but that was when I was a more confident driver and would just talk during the lesson.

Oh, and nothing to do with theory. He'd mention or ask about signs/speed limits as I was driving if it was relevant to the road I was driving on. Theory is really down to you. He otherwise only mentioned theory when I asked specific questions.