ListVerse: Driver’s education first began in the United Kingdom as a business in 1909. Twenty-five years later, the first high school driver’s ed course was opened in the United States. It offered students lessons in driving skills as well as hands-on training.
Since that time, such programs have been plagued, particularly in America, with unscrupulous instructors, hysterical students, and a myriad of maniacal drivers consumed with rage. The following 10 entries examine particularly bizarre driving lessons and license exams that took a dreadful turn for the worse. more
When did they start teaching no turn signals and rolling stops. I’ve never seen so much stupid on the road as the past 10 years and it seems to get worse every day.
No kidding, Different Tim. And screw you if you’re only going five over! ‘Cause I’ll ride your bumper until you die! People are SO impatient now.
The worst that I did was to turn immediately to the right when my drivers ed teacher Mr. Allen (he was also my shop teacher) told me to turn right, and I turned right as instructed right thru the front yard of a house. Mr. Allen had a talk with my mom later telling her that she needed to help me to learn how to drive better. I also learned to drive in the snowiest Winter of 1968/69 that Spokane had ever experienced where we got 6 ft. or more of snow in late Dec. 68 and early Jan. of 69. I became a very good Winter driver because of that experience.
@ GM
The company truck I drive is GPS tracked and dash cam, 5 mph over the speed limit is Max without getting dinged on points. So tailgate drivers don’t like that very much.
Oh well, I’m still learning not to care.
Do any of you remember when driver’s ed was taught in school? Our instructor was a really old football coach, I’m pretty sure he chose to teach the class because they were required to teach a subject to coach and it kept him out of a classroom. All we ever did was take him to run errands and drive around the state park so he could look at deer. lol
BC has graduated licensing. The friend of a young friend of mine was taking the driving test to upgrade his license. He came up to a red light and was told to make a right turn. He rolled it. He was immediately told that he failed the exam.
“But everybody rolls a right turn on red.”
“Not in their driving test, they don’t”
ORWW: My driving instructor was also the football coach. The only time he ran an errand was on Valentine’s Day when we stopped by a florist.
Geoff: That winter was pretty bad west of the mountains, too. We we thrilled when school was canceled for a week — until we found out that it just Spring Break three months early.
Like most of Generation Jones, driver’s ed was offered by our high school as a summer course. We met in one of several annexed trailers equipped with vehicle cockpits at which we learned the rudiments of how a vehicle operated before we got into a real car for road driving.
The funny thing about driver’s ed was that most of us already had been driving some kind of vehicle way before we were in a classroom. I think most of us went just to make sure we passed the written portion of the driver’s test. A kid we knew never took driver’s ed, but arrived at his DMV test driving the only vehicle available to him that day, his dad’s logging truck (sans trailer). I only heard about it, but I guess he passed the parallel parking requirement with flying colors.
…I’ve always wondered if he also got the class C stamp at the same time.
RadioMattM, I guess mine didn’t like his wife, he never bought anything for her. We would go by the utility office for him to pay his utilities, we’d go to the auto parts store, that was at least twice a week, we’d go run him by his house, we always assumed he needed to poop, every day we had to take him to get his cup of coffee and was told he would fail us if we spilled his coffee.
About the only thing he ever taught us was turnabouts, he really liked doing those in the state park. One of the kids one day asked him when he was going to teach us to parallel park and he said that was for his parents not him, that he didn’t get paid enough to teach us that.
The funniest though was this girl who could not drive, so she never got to go more than a block before he was making her stop, she didn’t listen one day and kept going and then ran us into a ditch. Nobody else go to drive that day, we were told to get out and walk back to the school and tell them to come pull them out and to also give them a message that they don’t pay him enough for this aggravation.
Whuut
does
a
yellow
light
mean?
One of the advantages of being a delivery driver was using the UPS driver trick of parking my van on the street and turning on my emergency flashers to run in and make deliveries if I couldn’t find a spot to park, it worked every time. I am also excellent at parallel parking when I need to if I get into tight spaces. And backing into parking garages in the downtown area when I made deliveries downtown when I worked for a courier company. My youngest brother knew how to drive before taking drivers ed because he was already driving my dad’s 56 Ford F 100 P/U truck back and forth to school. And his drivers ed teacher knew it and allowed him to teach other kids how to drive as well.
My dad taught me to drive a dozer at 12, a pick up at 14 and a semi at 16. I miss him.
What don’t they teach Driver Ed and Sex Ed in the same semester in Arab high schools?
Answer: It’s too hard on the camels.
We’re here all week…try the veal…and don’t forget to tip your server.
Ann, it’s “Why” not “What”…
“She had one job…”
Blue Toof, in Arab drivers ed classes with camels their theme song could be Ahab the Arab by Ray Stevens with all the camels named Clyde. Do you use a hitching post to park a camel? Do Arab sex ed classes teach their students to have sex with camels and sheep and goats as well as little boys?
In Iran they can’t teach Drivers Ed on the same day as Sex Ed because the camel is already busy.
A friend of mine owns and operates a driving school
He said about half the teen students don’t know how to sign their names in cursive. So part of the curriculum is how to sign your name on the state forms
AA, I had been driving since I was 12, well before that if you count doing all the steering from a lap. Learned how to drive in a standard.
We were talking about standards the other night and this young man in his early thirties asked, “what’s a standard?” My husband said a standard transmission and then to his blank stare said, “stick shift.” He still didn’t understand, after explaining it to him, he says, “like a semi-truck. We told him yep, except way less gears.
ORWW — Yup! We were driving tractors and farm trucks as soon as we could reach the peddles and see over the steering wheel at the same time. And nothing anyone owned had an automatic transmission. My initial licensed driving was in a ’54 Ford PU with 3 on the tree. Easiest thing to drive. I then bought a junkyard Studebaker station wagon for $100 and a school teacher helped me (he did most of the work) fix it up. I had the pleasure of meeting the car’s original owner while I still in H.S. He said he ran the mileage up as a territorial salesman in the NW states. It was a cool car when everything on it worked.
…it’s really too bad that kids today don’t know the thrill and terror of coming to a stop uphill with a standard transmission. The tragedy is they don’t seem at all bothered by their abject ignorance of really ordinary stuff.