All these cliches about aviate ,navigate, communicate, or superior pilots----superior skills, old bold pilots etc are no use to man or beast, they just make instructors feel superior. What is needed is genuine devotion to the job/vocation of teaching , not a mindless attitude of "when is my job application for the airline going to be accepted."
Early in training I once asked an instructor for 15mins to myself to crawl about the floor to actually see the brake pedals, figure out how they worked relative to the rudder, where the fuel tap was & how it worked etc. I got about 30seconds before he was champing at the bit with "come on let's go". So off we went again fumbling around blindly trying to feel for things. I did a total of 29 hours of navigation exercises over country that I had flown gliders over for years, walked dogs over for even more years, camped in numerous times. I never yet got lost, I was never purposely gotten lost by any instructor in order to find myself.
I once applied some power to climb a few feet to clear a ridge by a better margin (glider pilot thinking) & put us barely into a wisp of mist, I could see through it, I could see the far side valley. The instructor literally ripped the yoke out of my hand, slammed it forward & returned to what I considered too close to the granite. I then watched him write on his notepad "Climbed straight into cloud!!!" With a triumphant flourish. He knew I had flown gliders. Yet I was made to feel like some stupid dumbassed numpty. At that point I decided to give in, go through the mill, get spat out the other side with a licence and then buy an aircraft with a tailwheel and get someone I had respect for to teach me to fly it. Or at least the tailwheel bit.
It was beaten out of me to use the rudder, "stop pissing about with it". Touch & go's "get the bloody nose wheel down before you power up", I was once griped at severely for not actually touching down, in spite of being constantly told to "get it down" up to the far end numbers, probably cost them £2 for a touch & go!
Most instructors do know what they are doing, but at the age of 66 when I finally started to fly power with the intention of finishing the course, I wish they would recognise that we may be rookie pilots but we are not rookie people, when they head out to sea at 3000ft "pull the power off & lose some height" and the glider pilot expresses the feeling of nervousness, pay attention, he isn't scared he just wouldn't do that in a glider!
What does piss them off is a PFL close to an into wind hill and the thing starts to climb, provided they will let you get close enough to it without screaming.
Excuse my ramblings, just my own experiences.