Californication (was: I've failed my driving test!)

[Jennifer Piersol]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley"
<dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> Constance Vigilance wrote:
> 
> > It varies by state, but in my state (California), when I went to 
> school (loooog ago), Driver's Ed was a required course in High 
> School. Driver's Ed was rules of the road, which took about 1 week 
> if you go slow, and the rest of the year was "health" (sex ed). 
> 
> I find this a fascinating observation on several levels.  Leaving 
> aside the interesting fact that allegedly right wing USA provides 
> driving lessons free while good ol' corporatist sclerotic Europe 
> insists that the individual pays, there is a vast Freudian field of 
> study in the apparent equivalence of driving and sex.

I also took driver's ed in California (hmm... 14 years ago?), and at
our school, we only had it for a semester.  The other semester, we had
a basic computer class - and by that, I really mean "Basic" - we
learned how to come up with simple programs in Basic for 18 weeks.

Anyway, my driver's ed 18 weeks was *all* driving.  I don't even
remember any part of high school being devoted to "health" - which is
perhaps why our county had the highest teen pregnancy rate in THE
WHOLE COUNTRY while I was at school.  That and the fact that we had to
drive 8 miles to get to a mall/movie theater.  Hmm... maybe we SHOULD
have had health mixed with driver's ed. ;)

All I remember from my driver's ed experience was "Red Asphalt" (is
that the name of that movie?  We watched #3, if I recall correctly)
and a story about a car accident told by my teacher.  That and another
story by my teacher about how he calculates how long he's been
teaching by how many Superbowls there have been, i.e., if it's
"Superbowl XXX", he knows he's been teaching 30 years.  Perhaps it was
amazing that I passed at all, huh?  I did, though one of my closer
friends didn't, and she was the valedictorian of her class.  She got
"The *itch" (she was Mormon, so she used W in place of the *), and it
took her 3 times to pass... she didn't until she was assigned to
another tester.  

Gosh, sorry for rambling... it's only 7am and I didn't get much sleep.
 Now I'm going to get all nostalgic about getting my driver's licence
13 years ago tomorrow... 

-Jen, nearing the end of her 20s...