Detour...Part 1

Hi everybody!

Whew!  This is going to be a very long recap, so I've decided to split it into 3 posts.  What a whirlwind week this has been!  Lots of traveling, learning, adjusting, and humbling experiences.  I'll start off with the biggest, and most humbling experience of them all: I'm back home in PA.

First off, yes, I'm okay!  I didn't leave due to an injury or other emergency.  Essentially, what happened is that the training was too fast-paced for me. I'm used to not only being at the head of my class, but being ahead of it, as well.  This was as big of a surprise to me as it perhaps is to many of you reading this right now.  After a few days in the program, the supervisor of the program and I sat down to discuss my progress and take an honest look as to where I was.  We mutually agreed that at the pace I was learning, I would not be able to take the exponential leaps between days to keep up with the new information being thrown at me.  We terminated my employment (I was considered an employee on day 1), and I traveling home the next day.

The decision came down to 3 things: communication style, learning style, and safety.  For those of you who know me best, you know that I like to keep information orderly, and tend to view most things in black and white.  While I've certainly grown more flexible in this, it is both my default as well as my personality.  There were aspects of the program that relied heavily on implication, approximation, and "common sense."  I perform best when things are clearly, directly, and completely explained.  

There were several foundational concepts I needed to have walking in to training to even have a hope of figuring out what the instructors really meant by what they said, but I didn't have those pieces.  I did as much research in advance as I could, but the feedback I gained from most (not all) truckers before entering school was that I would figure those things out once I arrived in training.  The training assumed I had figured those things out before arriving.  Clearly...there was a gap there.

Also, I'm neither a visual nor hands-on learner.  I learn by concept, pattern relationship, and assimilation.  For me, everything builds on top of something I already know.  If I nothing against which to assess a new piece of information, I don't grasp it, and I certainly don't retain it.  It's like building a building without a cornerstone, or handing someone a stack of books to put away without any shelves in the bookcase.  I am most successful when I can read, study, visualize in my mind, clarify, commit to memory, then put into action.  In the type of training I attended, not only was there not enough time to do this, there also weren't the proper resources, or incremental steps to learn/process this way.  

For example, Monday was spent doing new-hire paperwork and discussing the company values.  Tuesday morning, we discussed how to avoid common accidents.  Tuesday afternoon, we visited the yard to begin practicing our pre-trip inspection (an inspection that must be completed every day before driving the truck to identify potentially hazardous/deadly issues before it is too late to fix them).  In order to get a Class A CDL, you have to demonstrate to a DMV examiner that you know how to do this inspection correctly.