I'll acknowledge that when it comes to surfing my wife and I were starting from zero. Never tried it before. We are not completely inept. We ski, skate, bike, snorkel, swim . . . . you get the picture.
We were looking forward to giving surfing a try and read positive reviews here at tripadvisor. So we paid a little extra for semi private lessons to get some extra space and attention. Our instructor was a pleasant enough young guy that had been surfing for many years but only teaching for about 6 weeks.
After some dryland instruction in, I believe, Kalma Park we went down to the beach. We were learing in very shallow (knee to thigh deep) water. Sandy bottom with many rocks. When we went out to the area for the instruction there were many other instructors and students. Too many. We struggled to get up on the board (my wife did better than me), and in addition to falling off many times onto rocks just below the surface (we had many cuts, scrapes and bruises as reminders) we also had to dodge other novice surfers. This made whatever extra we paid for semi-private a waste of money.
The couple of times I got close to standing all the way up I had to bail out because someone was walking across my path. On one of the couple of times my wife did get up another student with another instructor ran into her with his board.
I can't really fault them for the rocks under the water (maybe there are sandier spots), but had I known better I would have insisted on them taking us to another section of beach so at the very least we did not have the addtional challenge of dodging other surf students.
We love Maui and have had many terrific excursions (on this trip Randy's Hike Safari, and the Seafire Molokini excursion were both excellent). I just cannot recommend these surf lessons based on our experience.