~I've had a stick shift car for almost as long as I can remember--more than 20 years. I can't imagine having anything else at this point (although if you'd seen me learning to drive a 3-speed lo these many years ago, you would not have believed that I'd come to love manual transmissions!) There is one major drawback to this, however: teaching my kids to drive. I can teach many things, but driving is not one of them, and having a manual transmission makes it all the more difficult!
~Luckily my older three kids were able to take driver's ed in high school. And Elder Son and WW benefited from me having a very worn out car that I wasn't too worried about when they were learning to drive, and I don't remember it being too big a deal (nor do I remember riding with them much while they were learning.) NSLS had a much harder time. She was nervous, I was nervous and she had a lot of trouble with the clutch. Finally a friend took her to get her license in her car (an automatic); she finally did master the clutch after college when she had my car for a couple of years while I finished seminary.
~The Kid turned 16 over a year ago, but for lots of not very good reasons he only just got his learner's permit a couple of weeks ago. And because driver's ed isn't taught in the public school he will have to take it at a driving school. Our current state has fairly stringent requirements for hours of training, so it's not a trivial expense. And once he finishes driver's ed, he still has to have more hours of supervised driving. So there's no way I'm getting out of being along for the ride.
~Really, the whole student driver thing makes me very anxious. (Just ask NSLS!) But I'm trying to be better about it. Last week WW took the Kid to an empty parking lot so he could try just starting up with the manual transmission--after all, getting going in 1st gear is half the battle. And this evening I took him again.
~He's not ready to hit the open road yet, but he did okay. Getting a smooth start is difficult--there's a fine line between bucking and jerking and peeling out. The really remarkable thing about today though, and the real reason I'm blogging it, is that we managed to not make each other nervous wrecks--I didnt' get too anxious and yell or nag, and he didn't get frustrated with me or the car. In fact, we both laughed a lot. Let's hope we can keep it that way until he gets his license!
3 comments:
oh, i am so with you! i thought of myself as a strong, steady, competent person, even if i am an overly cautious driver -- but when my son got his permit [at 18, for reasons that need not be recounted], i was a complete and utter wreck with the "helping him learn to drive" thing. and he had issues with me -- some legitimate, some based on the idea that under state law, he really didn't need all those supervised hours of practice at 18.
it went less hair-raisingly with my daughter, who got her permit at 17 and didn't go through the same "i'm invincible" thing as her brother.
p.s. -- i wanted to kiss the DMV person who failed my son on the first attempt. i nearly cried when another DMV person passed him the next time. my son had 2 crashes [both with airbag deployment] in his first 2 months of driving -- with one of them, he was trying to pull out of a parking space! that's when we junked the car and took him off our auto insurance. gah.
what i meant to say is -- it really sounds like things are going well so far with the kid learning driving skills! xoxo
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