The time: just days after my 16th birthday. The place: driving school.
The driving school has three teachers. Two are fat and one is thin. (Which is a horrible way to characterize human beings, but it is the characteristic that is relevant to this story.)
On the last day of our in-class instruction, we're told to go up to one of the teachers and sign up for in-car lessons. A large number of students flock to the thin teacher. My first thought is that they're discriminating against the fat teachers, so I should counter that by choosing one of the fat teachers.
One of the fat teachers taught our in-class sessions, so I decide to choose the other one so she'll get a chance too. And that's how I decided who my driving teacher would be.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it is now apparent to me, based on my and my peers' experiences with the different teachers available, that the thin teacher was a better driving teacher. Everyone I know who had her said she was good, and they all turned out to be good drivers. Word had obviously spread about who the best teacher was, and I never thought to ask around because it never occurred to me that we'd get to choose our own teacher, or that it would even matter who our teacher was.
My teacher wasn't as good, in that she wasn't able to tell where I was at or what I didn't know. She assumed things were obvious to me that weren't, and gave me B's and C's on my in-car skills without telling me how to do them better. (And, me being my 16-year-old self, it never occurred to me that I might be allowed to ask.)
I'm certainly not under the impression that it's my teacher's fault that I'm a bad driver. I'm inherently nervous and skittish and clumsy. I'm not that good at manoeuvring my own body in space, never mind a giant metal machine. I find the act of driving exhausting, having to be so alert to so many things all the time. But sometimes I wonder if things might have turned out if I'd made a better decision in choosing my teacher.
6 comments:
Wow, interesting.
Tell me some stuff about learning to drive in Ontario. Is driving school required? Do you need a certificate or something like that before you can take your test to get your license? How long is the course?
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When I was a kid, I worried that because I was so non-athletic and couldn't ride a bicycle very well (and avoided it), I wouldn't be able to drive a car. I used to ask my mom if you needed to know how to ride a bike in order to drive a car. I never saw my mom do anything athletic or physical except walking, and she drove a car, and I took hope from that.
For me the two were never related. I love to drive. I always thought the key to becoming a better driver was simply practice, but maybe not for everyone.
Driving school is optional, but it knocks your G1 (learner's permit) time down from 12 months to 8 months if you do it and pass. The course I took in the mid-90s was a week full-time during xmas break, plus a prescribed number of in-car lessons (I forget what the number was). It may well have changed since then, I have no idea. If I had to do it now, I'd shell out for daily private lessons, so I have no idea what the minimum requirements are.
I wasn't thinking of my clumsiness in terms of athleticism, I was just thinking that if I'm below-average at manoeuvring this body whose exact size and shape I'm intimately aware of and over which I have instantaneous control, I'm not going to be as good at manoeuvring something that's at least 10 times as heavy and moving at least 10 times as fast and whose size and shape I can't quite tell.
Oh you just took me back over a decade. I had a horrible driving instructor too. He yelled about everything so I drove white-knuckled through the classes, and he taught me how to manoeuvre based on the dimensions of his car only so I could not take anything I learned in his compact car and transfer it to the van I was practising on at home.
Oddly enough this actually made me a really good driver because I spent so much time re-teaching myself how to do the stuff in the larger vehicle and I had to work to maintain my confidence as a driver while someone was yelling at me from the passenger seat. So I learned despite him.
I got an "excellent" from the government examiner - who was, counter to stereotype, really pleasant.
I would not recommend this teaching method though because for the next two years I would have a mini panic attack anytime I saw someone who resembled my instructor or who wore a yellow coat like he did.
Really not good.
"I'm not going to be as good at manoeuvring something that's at least 10 times as heavy and moving at least 10 times as fast and whose size and shape I can't quite tell."
Right... except it doesn't matter how much the car weighs, you don't control it by strength, and if it's functioning properly, it's almost as easy to slow and stop as your own body.
I think it has more to do with practice and confidence than anything else. Tentative, non-confident drivers are generally bad drivers - which may apply to you.
Thanks for the Ontario info, no matter how dated.
@Sarah, yikes! Awful!
It's not as easy to slow and stop as my own body, because it's travelling faster. If I misestimate by one second while walking, that's a metre or two. If I misestimate by one second while driving, that's a couple of car-lengths, in which there might be other cars or pedestrians.
Plus the car can do so much more damage. I bump into someone walking down the street, I say oops, sorry, and get on with life. I bump into someone driving, I could easily kill them. My own baseline clumsiness would put lives at risk, so I'd need to drive significantly better than I do any other activity that takes up physical space.
@Sarah: Good for you for being able to teach yourself despite the shitty instruction you received!
They really need to come up with a website for rating driving instructors, like they have for professors.
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