First Day of Driving School is Over

LOL sounds like when I went to school. my left leg was like a wet noodle that first day. I never heard so much gear grinding in my life ! Once you get out of school you can just float the gears, much easier and your left leg will thank you - you can do it, just takes time and practice -

 

My spouse's first evening drive with a actual revenue run to the west was in Dallas rush. Combined with a nice cute complete closure of 30 in the Arlington Area requiring a old school Map work around in a hurry on my side of the cab.

My school was off Haven street in Baltimore City not far from Erdman and 40. The City was not the problem but the mountains were for me. Once the instructors understood it then started working on me.

Nothing like a house sized rock at the bottom of Luke Maryland stop sign covered in crosses to focus your stopping.

Or the old school wall in Cumberland downtown...and so on. (One of the recent pictures tell me that big trucks must have rode the right side outer tires clear up the #### thing more than halfway and there you are. half tipped over and about to run out of wall.

Either that or those are the dock versions of halloween scary stories, it was a dark and stormy night on big savage...

 

I read your posts in the thread and it all seems like you were having the normal difficulty everyone has and making quick progress. Almost everyone feels undertrained when they take their test. You will get so much practice everyday you really drive a truck after your license that shifting becomes second nature very quick, but you will still have some difficulty after that on occasion. EVERY newbie overestimates the difficulty in shifting and how long it will take them to do it well enough. You are doing fine.

 

The first ones to test out of school in my class were taught to float first then once we got the hang of it the instructor had us start double clutching. Made it a lot easier once we started running in heavy traffic or construction zones to stop watching the tach/speedometer and feel/hear our way to the next gear. I drove 4 diff trucks (all 10 speeds) that all had diff clutches. In the end I chose the truck with the lousiest clutch to test with and was pleased with the decision.

the other instructor kept his guys double clutching the entire time and discouraged even learning how to float because of a silly 5 point deduction on the road test.
The week before evaluations he lost 2 of his guys to our team. It took them 2 days and they were g2g for test day.

 

Yes, you can do this. You're at the very, very steep bottom of the learning curve. It looks like it's actually curving back over your head at this point, but it's not. Once you get the very basics down, things start getting easier. Not that you should ever, ever stop learning in this career, but once you're not sweating every little muscular movement, your learning horizon opens up.

When I went to school, I went for my first road test and I choked so bad I didn't even make it out of the parking lot. True story. Now I'm working on a quarter-century of trucking, and I amaze bystanders with the things I can make this rig do. But I try to never forget that I started out right where you are.

If I can do it, so can you.

(BTW, tell Hot Lips I said hi. )