The Aching Pathos of Taking a Driver's Education Class as an Adult
You learn a lot when you sign up for a half-assed driver’s education course as an adult, as I have twice in the past decade, first at Taggart’s Driving School back in 2016 and more recently at Nathan’s Driving School.
You learn about your teacher’s personality. You learn about your teacher’s personal and professional frustrations. You learn about their hopes and dreams and how they were crushed. You learn, if anything, way too much about your teacher’s sense of humor.
Yes, taking a driver’s education course deep into middle age is a glorious way to learn about the idiosyncrasies and foibles of weird strangers you never would have otherwise encountered.
It’s also a wonderful way to feel very old, very stupid and very inadequate.
To take a driver’s education course as a forty-five year old dad, husband and small business owner is to be thrust terrifyingly back into your distant past, to those awful high school days spent studying and learning and taking tests and desperately hoping to impress authority figures.
It’s not that I don’t like learning. I fucking LOVE learning. It’s damn near my favorite thing in the world. I pride myself on being a lifelong learner. But I love learning about things that fascinate me. I love immersing myself in the areas of my extensive expertise. The idea of having to learn about something you find terrifying and prohibitively difficult, even impossible, like learning how to drive, however, fills me with existential dread.
I was filled with a soul-consuming sense of hopelessness throughout my thirty hours at Nathan’s Driving School. It kicked in almost immediately once I realized that I had most assuredly signed up for a class specifically designed to help Georgia high school students fulfill their driver’s education requirement and graduate.
Seeing as how I graduated from high school in Chicago in 1994, a good decade before my fellow students were even born, and graduated from a good Big Ten University (University of Wisconsin at Madison) in 1999, I did not need any help graduating from high school in Georgia in 2021.
What you do not necessarily learn from taking a Driver’s Education class via Zoom, however, is how to actually drive a car. I was hoping that taking my second driver’s education class would make me feel more confident about my ability to get a driver’s license so I can finally start driving.
That did not happen. Instead I felt less comfortable with myself as a future driver as the class went along. I constantly wanted to ask my teacher, who, like all driving instructors was a real character, whether or not what we were being taught had any goddamn validity at all or whether I was wasting an enormous amount of money and time I could otherwise devote to finishing The Joy of Trash or spending time with my family.
At Taggart’s Driving School my teacher broadcast her contempt for her job and her employers by having us watch an insane amount of driver’s ed videos that did little but run out the clock and make her job and life easier.
This time around I found myself desperately missing those driver’s ed videos and the distraction they provided. My new teacher only showed us videos from a show called Canada’s Worst Drivers that I became way too emotionally invested in.
As a student of life and a student of human nature, I can’t help but find the deep, aching sadness and ennui of driver’s education courses poignant and compelling but at this stage in my life I just want to learn how to drive.
As with Taggart’s Driving School, I was much closer in age, experience and hair loss to my sixty-something teacher than my fellow students, whose boredom was palpable. I don’t blame them.
It all led up to a big test on the final day of class where we could look up the answers on Google. I nevertheless felt a weird surge of pride when I scored an 87 on the final exam. That pride quickly dissipated, however, when I tried to sign up for behind-the-wheel instruction and was told I would need to bring my driver’s permit to my first class, and I was very stupidly under the impression that I either didn’t need a driver’s permit for behind-the-wheel training, or that that stupid test was for a driver's permit and not just a goddamn waste of my time.
Now I need to pass the test for the driver’s permit before I can continue the next part of the course. Will I succeed? I dunno! My class at Taggarts was at least devoted primarily towards helping us get our driver’s permit. I unfortunately can’t say the same about my 30 hours at Nathan’s, which I fear was a complete waste.
I’m not going to lie: being behind the wheel still scares the shit out of me, possibly even more than it did before I took the course but I’m determined to succeed this time where I have failed before.
At the very least, I should be able to get some blog posts out of it. For a blogger perpetually in need of subjects and inspiration, that’s a hell of a consolation even if it’s no substitute for actually acquiring the skills I desperately need and am working diligently, if incompetently, to attain.
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