I started cdl school yesterday, and I feel like my instructor is not good, especially after what he had me do today.
Yesterday we went over pretrip. He walked us through everything once and then we had the rest of the day to go over it with him. He half assed it and moreso just let us figure it out with the notebooks we were given. I’m not necessarily opposed to this teaching style, trial and error, and I believe that really testing yourself will help you remember it better, but he honestly just seemed lazy.
Today we did some basic backing, like a straight back and offset back. He walked us through how to do it once, and then let us figure it out. Today was my first ever time driving a truck ever.
After that he sent everyone else home (super small class, only 4 people total) and he and I started to go over shifting (manual truck with no trailer). We went to this less busy public road and we started. He super briefly went over how to do it one time and then had me do it. We did starting and up shifting for about 10 minutes until I got a feel for it, then we spent another 10ish minutes practicing downshifting until I just started to understand how to do it. Practice both of them for another 5ish minutes and then he told me where to go. I assumed we were going back to the parking lot. I was wrong.
We immediately went onto a highway and then straight into very heavy downtown traffic. I was obviously very stressed as I could _just barely_ start to shift the thing and there were hundreds of cars everywhere. I have experience driving a manual car, so I was trying to fight my muscle memory with that. I really had to think about what to do to upshift and downshift, downshifting especially. The entire time he was telling me “easy, easy dude. calm down”. That of course only made me more stressed which lead me to make more and more mistakes. I was less worried about downshifting and more worried about not hitting any cars as he was having me change lanes all the time too. An extremely nervy wracking experience on my end and really dangerous as a result. I did not feel safe or ready _AT ALL_. I’m all for pushing yourself but this was too far imo.
And to top all of this off, he was telling me some “tips” like “it’s ok to cut people off if you need to make the exit and you weren’t paying attention” and “you can take your 30 in the fuel aisle”
I want to know, is this normal? Do cdl classes usually move this quickly? Am I overreacting? Or is this dude insane and I should report him?
Thank you all so much!
Edit: thanks to everyone that replied, looks like this is a normal thing and I’m overreacting. I knew we would be road driving but didn’t imagine it would have been this soon. I’m more surprised than anything lol
