🕳️ Instructor Note: Pothole Season Survival (Sudbury Edition)
"If you can fit a whole chicken in the hole, avoid it!"
There is a special time of year in Sudbury when the snow melts… and the roads reveal their true personality.
Pothole season is not just a nuisance — it’s a full-contact sports driving experience.
For instructors, it adds a layer of constant high-grade stress to every lesson. You are no longer just coaching steering, speed, and awareness — you are actively scanning the road surface like a tactical radar operator, spotting craters before your student discovers them the hard way.
Students, especially new ones, tend to fixate on lane position or oncoming traffic. Meanwhile, you’re quietly tracking that shadow in the asphalt ahead, calculating:
- Is it shallow… or suspension-ending?
- Do we steer around it… or absorb it safely?
- Is there traffic beside us… or do we have an escape path?
All of this happens in seconds, often while maintaining a calm, steady teaching voice.
“Nice and smooth… keep your lane… slight adjustment left!”
- What the student hears: gentle guidance.
- What the instructor feels: asteroid field navigation.
Potholes also introduce unpredictable vehicle reactions — sudden jolts, steering feedback, or loss of smooth control — which can rattle nervous drivers and disrupt otherwise stable practice.
🎯 Why it matters
- Increases cognitive load for both instructor and student
- Requires earlier scanning and decision-making
- Demands smoother, more strategic steering inputs
- Reinforces the importance of space management and lane positioning
🧠 Instructor mindset
Treat pothole season as an advanced awareness training phase.
You’re not just avoiding damage — you’re teaching students how to read the road itself, not just the traffic on it.
Because in Sudbury, sometimes the biggest hazard… is the road pretending to be Swiss cheese. 🧀🚗