After 11 riding lessons

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OP, I echo the advice of trying somewhere else.

To the instructors on here, I agree with you that saintly horses who look after riders are essential for novices. I'm another who never teaches people to kick: I start people off as I want them to continue, just altering my terminology for the rider to take account of their age/language/insert other "barrier" here.

Where I was teaching, most of our mounts for beginners would be listening for my voice command, as well as reacting to a wobbly rider before it went pear shaped. So for two or three adult beginners I would need one lead rein assistant, but for a group of children beginners, I would need a lead rein assistant with all. For adults my terminology was normally a quick squeeze, sometimes escalated to a nudge. But never, ever "kick".

 

[GreyMane]

This thread has brought up some interesting (and uncomfortable) thoughts about how we treat and train horses that "Won't go".
Humans are goal driven. Horses aren't, they need us to not be angry or in a hurry, to act as if we have all the time in the world, and focus more on reward and less on punishment.

Mark Rashid books include some humbling accounts of horses that seemed very "shut down" - but quickly started responding again after he spent some time looking for and rewarding "the smallest try" rather than punishing the slow response, which is our tendency. No wonder the horse feels like there's nothing in it for him.

On that note OP you may like to watch this - it has closed captioning. How many riding school horses look exactly like this? How many times would some people have smacked this horse in 18 minutes?
I love this woman's patience.

(Edited to add, her name is Marlis Amato. And it needs to be riding school staff keeping horses motivated, not pupils)

When you're learning, lesson time is very precious, you are in a hurry to get to the goal and experience the action, speed and excitement you got a taste of on your polo day. Most of us remember going through this stage, wanting to canter and gallop all day long. But -- we didn't know what we didn't know, that there's so much more to it than that