Sinner's Alley Happy Hour (Part 1)

Parent Cafe Parent Cafe
2801

<p>I must be the weirdo. I rather enjoyed teaching our daughter how to drive.</p>

<p>We started out in the parking lot complex of the local community college. Several sessions of basic control drills. Accelerating. Emergency braking. Large figure 8s laid out with cones to work on smooth braking, looking through a curve, and smoothly accellerating. </p>

<p>Lots and lots of simulated stop sign and left/right turns on the roadways around the parking lots. Three point turns on narrow accessways. And, so forth.</p>

<p>Then, we graduated to back roads with very little traffic. Basically, just incrementally raising the challenge at each stage of comfort.</p>

<p>For several months, we played a game no matter who was driving...scanning the horizon and identifying potential hazards (cars backing up out of a driveway that might pull out, etc.).</p>

<p>I think the mistake to be avoided is throwing both basic car control and traffic at the kid simultaneously. It's not fair. You have to find a spot where you can practice the basics -- smooth braking, smooth acceleration, predictable turns, emergency full-tilt braking -- before adding traffic into the mix. Let them feel confident in physically driving the car first.</p>

<p>Later, we went out in snowstorms to a big parking lot and gave her a chance to really feel anti-lock braking in action, sliding the car on ice, etc.</p>

<p>Several days of parallel parking practice in front of the house using plastic garbage cans as cars front and rear, so she could practice swinging the nose in to the spot without repurcussions if she misjudged it. Started out with a generous space and gradually moved the garbage cans closer.</p>

<p>All of this took place before she took the mandatory official drivers ed course. The stories she told about kids in the class nearly killing them with their first ever time behind the wheel taking place in traffic. I just don't get that.</p>

2802

<p>Hey, I did the community college parking lot with my daughter, too. On a Sunday. Same thing, lots of looping around, figure 8's, practice pulling in & out of parking spaces, driving from one parking lot to the next. </p>

<p>I also rather enjoyed the time with my daughter. She's a dancer and seems to have an innate awareness of the space around her, so it kind of felt my daughter was making the car dance. Very graceful turns & loops.</p>

<p>Of course it still was a different story when we had to confront a real street with traffic. My daughter was such a good driver that everyone in the family felt comfortable with her -- but we still had some nasty close calls due to her inexperience. It's the unexpected that causes the problems -- other cars swerving out of their lanes, or cutting you off, etc. It just takes time to be alert to all of those possibilities.</p>

2803

<p>My son's first driving lesson with an agency was at 4 pm on a December day, with inner city traffic. It was Friday and it was raining. The only appointment we could make! He told me later his gum-chewing instructor was more interested in where he came from then showing him what to do. Needless to say, he was traumatized but recovered with time.</p>

2804

<p>D learned to drive on the ranch. All the physical skills have been there for years (golf carts, then utility vehicles, then trucks). Translating those to traffic and highway speed has been a might more difficult.</p>

2805

<p>For me, it just made me a nervous wreck. First off, we don't have any large empty parking lots to start off teaching, like you guys have. I live in a rural area, on a dirt road in the mountains. Like you, I started slowly with my kids and did not want them to drive in any traffic with other vehicles until they could safely handle the car. So, we started out on back roads near our home but they are all DIRT. To get to paved roads, it means driving amongst other vehicles, though to some extent, that is true on the dirt ones as well. Well, how do you tell the kid to stay on the right side when there is NO center line? And if a car is coming the other way, it made me have a heart attack when they were just starting. Then if they move over toward the right side of the dirt road and there is no shoulder, it means the wheels going into a ditch. Until they got more experience, I was just holding on for dear life! Second child was like singing (she is always singing but you have to know that music is her life) and I'm like, nuh, uh, not WHILE you are driving! And I was just so nervous because so many factors come up that they don't have experience with even though I started out step by step adding a few more elements as I felt they could handle it....eventually onto paved roads with other cars, etc. Parallel parking cannot be done at my home so it meant doing it in the village with real cars. We don't have a "street" or curbs by my house. </p>

<p>I recall when my younger D had her permit, and had "graduated" to driving at night on 50 mph roads....I let her drive home from our dance studio which is 25 miles from our house. The driving where we live has NO street lights so it is total darkness on two lane roads that are winding. It started to snow. Already, I'm holding on for dear life because I just am the type who wonders if they will handle the car as I would and I don't know what they are thinking or going to do. I'd be telling her what to do and she'd be mad that she knew what to do but I would have no way to KNOW she'd really do it and didn't want to take any chances. Next thing I know I see a BRIGHT white light shining ahead of us in our lane in the darkness. It made me assume someone was coming our way in our lane because it was a bright white light. I am yelling at her to slow down and it is snowing. My instincts would have been to slow WAY down and she had no experience with such unexpected events. Thankfully I was there yelling at her as to what to do because next thing I knew we came upon a tractor traveling in our lane at a couple miles per hour (50mph road) which is super dangerous at night as one would not expect to come up to a tractor going that slowly on a road like that in the dark and also it wasn't a red rear light but a blinding white light. Had I not yelled to slow way down and also the fact that snow was on the road (which had started into our journey), I really think she would have crashed right into the tractor, never realizing that a white light was very odd in the road and that anything like that could have been there. Also, I've driven on the road when lots of dear run across it, even a moose once. These are not things an inexperienced driver is used to. Even I am not (a deer ran across the interstate once in the dark right in front of my vehicle that hit it head on at 65 mph). So, I am just the nervous type being a passenger with a kid learning to drive. Driving around here has its own set of challenges...maybe not like freeway or city traffic but other challenges and risks abound. I put in so many hours with each kid before they got their licenses. </p>

<p>While I am the nervous type when it comes to these things with my children, I'm proud to say I let my 18 year old last summer drive 6,000 miles to Alaska....so I have survived teaching them to drive and have gone "far", I think. Then again, a year ago, I had my then 16 year old, who after driving only 2 months with her license, be in a near fatal car crash where she was severely injured. So, I do have some "right" to being "nervous". It may be different for Dads, I am not sure. My husband would take them to drive and not get at all nervous when they were behind the wheel. Go figure. </p>

<p>Susan</p>

2806

<p>I started off in a parking lot. I got pulled over on day 1! Someone had heard the ruckus (imagine a 16-year-old in a stick-shift Volvo with a quarter million miles on it) and called the cops, who came over to investigate. Nothing wrong, sir, just a dad trying to teach his daughter how to get the car into first gear. </p>

<p>Zeus also gave me the intensive course in merging on and off the highway (and getting the shifting down). To that end, he made me drive around a cloverleaf for 45 minutes. On the highway, off at the next ramp, downshift, up the ramp, into third, down the ramp, onto the highway.... But I learned, which is the important part.</p>

<p>Not sure if I missed the discussion, but did y'all hear about the recent driving deaths in MA? They are considering raising the driving age to 17 1/2 - shortly after two kids died in a bad wreck. BMW was going over 100 mph when it skidded off the road, through a guardrail, and into a tree.</p>

2807

<p>Aaack! Driving lessons...Once during a lesson with D, she was doing her customary crazy-lane driving (swerving between lanes), and we were coming up a blind hill. It was either the shortcut (over the blind hill) or past the busy grocery store parking lot, and I didn't feel like running over any pedestrians that day. :p </p>

<p>As we chugged up the hill, she started to veer across the center line into the Land of Roadkill. Coherent thoughts and communications failed me, and I began to use my upper body in a manner consistent with the Village People (Y-M-C-A!) to signal her to GO THAT WAY, vainly motioning with my flattened hands toward my passenger window, which I would have happily thrown myself out of, if it came down to it.</p>

<p>The only sentence I could generate was, "Guh gerk ahhh gek-k-k!" which meant, "For chissake, get into your own lane!" :D There are moments when parents are so terrified that we actually black out for a second or two, and then the blood rushes back into our cerebellums and reality intrudes. It must have made sense to D when she slammed on the brakes in the middle of the street on the blind hill and decided to stop the car. Yeah, she really showed me!</p>

<p>Several more expletives and profanities later (nothing but exclamation points and asterisks at that point), she turned the wheel and edged us out of the oncoming lane of traffic. When I drug my sorry stunned self into the house, SluggH could tell that the driving lesson had not gone well. ;)</p>

<p>We were spared the whole driving thing with sluggD. Learning to drive in a place where mean guys throw Bichons into traffic didn't fit her non-confrontational, Holly Golightly persona. ;)</p>

2808

<p>
[quote]
Learning to drive in a place where mean guys throw Bichons into traffic didn't fit her non-confrontational, Holly Golightly persona.

[/quote]

LOL!! Slugg, that made my day. :) I learned to drive in one of those areas - I think I needed testosterone shots for a while to get through it. Now I just put on my bulldog face, attach one hand to the horn, one foot to the accelerator, one foot to the brake, and one finger out the window - and I'm good to go. :D</p>

2809

<p>aries, I had a similar learn-to-drive experience-- but the car was my father's treasured porsche :eek:! With about 6 circuits of the shopping mall, I believe I put at least 20,000 miles on his heart!</p>

2810

<p>LOL, SBMom! I can somehow picture that happening... watching his baby drive his baby. Which one ultimately wins?</p>

2811

<p>Slugg, my D was practing one day and turned left in front of not one, not two, but <em>three</em> oncoming cars...headed straight for <em>me</em>. I survived. So did D. But I relate to the incoherency.</p>

2812

<p>This thread takes me back to my own student days when, on my first driving lesson, I was rear-ended by a drunk driver in a stolen car while waiting for a traffic light in a very sketchy neighborhood in Philadelphia. When he attempted to flee on foot, the driving instructor (an ex-state policeman) ran after him and several tense minutes ensued before the police arrived and escorted us out of there. Then I had to get the instructor to write me a note because my books were in the trunk, which could not be opened.</p>

2813

<p>Hahahahaha, BassDad! Sounds like a driving lesson from The French Connection with Gene Hackman as your driving instructor! :D </p>

<p>Then, there was my dad's method for teaching us kids how to drive...Streets? Who needs streets when you have the Mohave Desert and a cold, Budweiser tall-boy in a styrofoam beer cozy?...Oh, and a company Blazer! Yee-haw, it's a driving less'n, Nevada-style! </p>

<p>See, in Southern Nevada kids learn to drive when they're eight. It's usually the result of playing in unlocked vehicles while the adults are in the air-conditioned house doing anything but watching the kids. My parents and their friends were usually smoking cigarettes and playing Cribbage for five or six hours at a time, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes at night after supper. Cribbage was sort of the Sixties version of World of Warcraft for our Twenty-Something parents. A plague of giant radioactive locusts could have been heading down from Utah about to devour the clothes lines and Bermuda grass lawns, and our parents would not have noticed or cared. Weekend Cribbage tournaments were prime time for unsupervised kid activities, and what eight-year olds did with their free time was their (the eight-year olds') business! ;)</p>

<p>When we were old enough to get behind the wheel legally, the parents in our town basically gave us either a used Dart or a Pacer and told us to drive. My parents were in possession of a monstrous Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, and unlike the 70's Show teenagers, I refused to be seen in the vehicle, with or without my parents. </p>

<p>Whenever the weather was nice my dad would turn benevolent, and one Sunday afternoon, he offered to let me drive the Blazer. At 16, I had learned not to question his good moods, so off we went straight into the desert. </p>

<p>I don't want to think about all of the endangered species I might have snuffed out that day. A few rattlesnakes and maybe a tortoise were surprised when a five thousand pound truck rolled over the tops of their critter holes. If the goal was to teach me how to bomb through gullies and spin brodies in the desert, we accomplished that. :)</p>

2814

<p>
[quote]
...Now I just put on my bulldog face, attach one hand to the horn, one foot to the accelerator, one foot to the brake, and one finger out the window - and I'm good to go. --aries

[/quote]

LOL, aries! Add a bumper sticker that says, KEEP HONKING - I'M RELOADING, and we could be driving buddies!</p>

2815

<p>slugg,</p>

<p>You bring back memories of my actual first driving lessons... Up at Lake Tahoe in the summer, got dropped off at the home of friends whose parents must have been playing cribbage too... Their kids taught me to drive in an old pickup truck-- and I mean OLD. Maybe 1938?... it had a push button ignition. We were tooling all around their place (the parents were summer caretakers of a ski resort-- they had miles of dirt roads and parking lots) just having a BALL. I was 11 or 12. </p>

<p>In <em>my</em> childhood, same general time period was also when we learned to SMOKE (by stealing lipsticky butts from my aunt, straightening them out and smoking them in the back of her garden.) </p>

<p>What were the adults doing? Playing BRIDGE!</p>

2816

<p>from cars to cards.....
My parents would leave my sister and I with our two grandmas who would then set up the card table and we would have a rousing weekend of Canasta!</p>

2817

<p>Well, I didn't learn to drive at age 11. But I did learn to smoke and kiss at that age. Back of the Bowling Alley for both, thank you very much. ;) We may not have had deserts in my more urban upbringing than Slugg and SB, but hey - that didn't mean we were deprived! :D</p>

<p>I gave up the smoking within the year. But not the kissing. :rolleyes:</p>

2818

<p>^ OK, I see this thread is headed for moral turpitude again... :)</p>

2819

<p>Yea, its what we do best. :)</p>

2820

<p>

oooooooooh la la....my favorite type of topic! ;) Count me in!</p>

<p>~berurah</p>