Driver’s ed is a little bizarre when you think about it. I’m spending two weeks of my summer in a small and slightly chilled room with with fifteen kids from other private schools watching badly written videos about safety on roadways. It may be a bit weirder for me due to the fact that I was unaware I was taking it until a few days before the class started. My parents and I were unsure whether the in-class portion of drivers ed was required.
Spoiler alert: it is.
Such ignorance is a prime example of why being an only child can be confusing. This could also apply to those without an older sibling, but I’ve noticed that parents with multiple children are often more connected with the school-age community.
Interesting, but this is a topic for another day.
What I’ve found most interesting about driver’s ed (the instructor is well aware that the material is less than riveting) is the bizarre mixture of kids in the class. There are kids from all sorts of schools! This societal merging is much more entertaining than actual driving merging.
But I’ve found one guy the most interesting. There’s this redhead who sits to the left and a little bit behind me (I sit in the front like a LOSER). For this story I’m just going to call him Redhead Kid. In truth, I don’t actually know his name.
Redhead kid goes to one of the county high schools and lives a bit out in country area. He speaks with a bit of an accent and says “yes, ma’am” sometimes. He tells the instructor he plans to miss a day in class because of a baseball recruiting trip. The second day we learn he plans to join the military.
Now I forget that people actually do that kinda stuff. I live in a relatively progressive area sandwiched between people who still fly the stars n’ bars and those who are military-made. So naturally I don’t find people in my immediate area who address men by “sir”, or say “atta girl” when we watch a woman narrowly avoid a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer. Redhead Kid is one of those people.
He says these kind of kind of old-fashioned things while telling us a tale about how his friends “probably” didn’t hit someone driving back from beach week at 2 a.m., or while sharing his wisdom about how some of the most Christian boys schools have some of the highest rates of partying, drugs, and alcohol.
(A small aside: his story was about how he and his friends were at an intersection driving back from the beach early in the morning, when a pickup comes from the other direction with somebody mattress surfing off the back, like this:
Who that heck wakes up at 2 a.m. and thinks “hey, this is a good time to go mattress surfing”??)
For all his seemingly antiquated manners, people like Redhead Kid have an awful predisposition to be troublemakers. This connection has always baffled me.
Is it the overbearing parents that cause the feeling of necessary rebellion? Is it the issues that the parents refuse to discuss due to ‘traditional values’ that kids find themselves attracted to? Or is it only so strange to me because I’m not used to such adolescent behavior being so greatly contrasted with such a seemingly strict institution as the military?
Who the fuck knows. Driver’s ed is a weird place. You meet weird people and learn about weird things. I say good luck to Redhead Kid! (Although I admit my first thought when he told us about his future was “he won’t make it in military school”). At least he’ll know how to drive better than his friends.
Telling Observations 