Help provide wide experience
difference and different situations
If you drive for one hour along a stretch of road and do it 100
times, you've just had 100 hours of much the same experience. Drive
100 different roads, each for one hour, and you've had much 'wider'
and more beneficial experience.
This page explains the importance of difference for your learner
driver, how you can create it and how you can help them learn to
manage difference.
If your learner driver does lots of different driving, they will
invariably gain wide experience and come across new situations. If
they find a new situation difficult, it means their brain is being
stretched. Within reason, that's good – it requires them to develop
some of the thinking skills they will need in order to anticipate
and manage different driving situations when they’re by themselves,
driving on P’s.
If your learner driver goes mostly the same way and does much
the same thing in every practice session, they will find that
driving becomes progressively easier and easier. Finding something
easy that you've been told is difficult, complex, and potentially
dangerous can lead to overconfidence.
Overconfident people are generally more accepting of risk or are
partially blind to it. This is another reason to build more and
more difference into practice sessions.
Difference is obviously good but it's not always easy to
achieve. Here are some ideas that may help you:
- Go different ways and at different times
- Go different places whenever you can
- Go in different cars and conditions
- Go for different reasons
- Go, but then turn around
- Go with different passengers
- Go with different distractions
- Go with tactics for
managing difference
- Go deeper - think
deeply about the experiences you have
