Trucking School - Weekend Classes vs Mon - Fri

Mon-Fri. You repeat stuff every day, like pre-trips & post-trips. It stays fresh in your brain. You go on the weekends amd work a regular job mon-fri, you will not retain the knowledge as well.

 

I agree go full time if possible

 

There not much to digest it more of a repeat action better to do it 5 day a week then ever weekend just to forget by next Friday cause all you really learning is shifting and pre trip and backing

 

once you get your permit there isn’t much material other than pre-trip. And pretrip memorization (for me) is easier if you’re doing it consecutively up til the test day. It helped that I recorded the 40 min pretrip video we watched every morning after roll call to watch on weekends too.

Retaining proper backing/driving skills for me was easier with just the weekend off because I could focus 4 days straight on what I was doing wrong. Plus we were split up in 2 (3) man teams with one team driving and one on the backing pad at any given time. It’d drive me nuts to wait 5 days to get back in the seat if I was having trouble.

 

We did our 5 days a week and still met on Saturday mornings to use the “dead” tractor to quiz each other on the pre-trip and the air brake sections.
Test day is a bytch, but you can make it your bytch, lol.

 

I went weekends for 4 months. Plenty of time to decompress between what turned out to be a awesome group of instructors and students. Into our third month we were having competition to see who could dock it fastest on the clock and so on. It was a party of sorts. I scored a 98 of 100 on the Maryland Road test in glen burnie back when they were still route two under construction before the I-97 days. It was a roadtrip from hell. But nothing compared to what I was getting into that first year.

 

I took 3 years go complete my private pilot's license while most people complete it in 2-6 months. Taking longer will usually not be as good since you may have to re-learn or re-fresh the skills that decayed while you were not in training. Think of a baseball batter that hits 3 pitches per day versus a batter that takes 2 hours of batting practice per day, maybe 100 pitches.

Granted you waste a LOT of time in M-F classes standing around or sitting in the sleeper watching the other students get their turn at the controls.

I think weekend vs M-F comes down to convenience and current job, not quality of learning. You don't want to give up your current paying job and become really stressed just to possibly get a 3% better training from a M-F school.

The weekend school may have better training if there are a lot less students and the training you get is more personal and less using 5 different instructors, with 5 different styles and 5 different names for common things.

 

And more time to forget. Each person has to honestly understand if they need more time to digest are are they more likely to forget. Neither one suggests one is dumb and one is smart. The daily class allows you to focus on that subject. The weekend class interrupts your training with all of the real life that happens M-F between classes. If you are doing nothing now, get the classes completed ASAP. There is a lot less to learn than most people outside imagine. You aren't learning calculus or statistics for the first time in your life and then using them in high-risk situations, you are learning to adapt your driving of small vehicles to driving a large vehicle plus a lot of rules you will use all day every day.