I’d like you to think back to your younger days –
specifically, those days when you were too young to have a driver’s license,
but old enough to know that it was something you desperately needed. The days
of driver’s ed.
One thing you should know about South Dakota is that it’s
ridiculously easy to get your learner’s permit. At least, it was easy twelve
years ago when I was about to ascend into the ranks of motor vehicle operators.
In South Dakota, you can get your learner’s permit at 14. I guess the DMV
figured that you’d been driving farm equipment since you were old enough to
reach the pedals anyway (which is totally true – in my case, since I was
eight), so you might as well get a license already.
The easiest way to get said learner’s permit was to go
through driver’s education. Not only would it result in cheaper insurance for
your parents (whose good side you wanted to be on, because what good is a
driver’s license if your parents wouldn’t let you drive their car?), but it
meant that you spent less time having to drive with a parent and that you could
avoid the DMV road test when you turned 16 and got your regular license.
Most schools offer driver’s ed as a class during the school
year: but not Arlington. We had to sacrifice a chunk of our extremely valuable
summer vacation to be in driver’s ed. It was held at the school, so even though
it was June, we still had to drag ourselves back to the classrooms and try to
focus.
My memory may not serve me correctly here, but I recall us
only having three full days of class and two half-days. The rest of the two
half-days was spent with the driver’s ed teacher taking us in threes and having
us drive around town. After that initial week, we each were assigned two
three-hour driving shifts with the driver’s ed teacher. However, those shifts
were shared with another student, so you only ended up driving an hour and a
half each time. Then, if you did well enough on your written test and in the
car, the teacher would sign your little form, and off you went to get your
learner’s permit, which would magically turn into a restricted permit in just
three months’ time.
So here’s your summary: a few days of classes + about three
hours of driving + one state with easy-peasy driver’s ed requirements = instant
license.
Of course, it didn’t seem so easy at the time. You had to
get up SO EARLY (probably 7? I know, what a tragedy) during the summer and sit
in a stuffy classroom for DAYS, and then you had to drive around in an old
white Buick clearly labeled “student driver.” SO EMBARRASSING. Luckily, you
didn’t have to worry about any of your friend seeing you because they were all
in driver’s ed right along with you.
I remember very little about the classes themselves, except
that they were in our FACS (Family and Consumer Science to the layperson)
classroom and that we spent more time watching videos about horrific traffic
accidents than actually learning about traffic laws. I also remember eating ham
and cheese Lunchables in the gym for lunch. Clearly, my brain doesn’t prioritize
very well.
The written test came at the end of these days of classes,
and that was a lengthy multiple-choice exam that I passed with something like a
95%. If you passed the written test (and I think we all did), that meant that
we could actually take the car on the road.
The initial driving portion consisted of only about fifteen
minutes of actual drive time. You, the driver’s ed teacher, and two other
students got in the car and proceeded to cruise around Arlington. No big deal.
The outside of class driving was when things started to get
serious. The driver’s ed teacher wanted you at the school at something like 7
in the morning so you’d miss all the traffic (and I use “traffic” in the
loosest sense of the word. We’re talking rural South Dakota, after all). My
driving partner was from Volga, so I’d have to show up in Arlington and spend
an agonizing fifteen minutes in the car by myself with the driver’s ed
instructor while we went to pick up my co-driver.
Day One of driving had us tooling around Brookings.
Brookings was significantly more intimidating than Arlington: unlike Arlington,
it actually had stoplights. We learned about changing lanes, and we practiced
gliding into parking spaces in the WalMart parking lot. Day Two was solely
about learning how to drive on the interstate. If we made it through those two
obstacles, we were awarded with a license.
Our driver’s ed instructor was a weird guy. During one of
our driving sessions, he had us stop by his house so he could pick up something
he had to return to WalMart (which is how we ended up doing our parking
practice at WalMart). He would eat sunflower seeds the WHOLE TIME you were
driving, and he’d spit the shells into this gigantic plastic cup. He never
emptied said cup, so each time you were in that car, the pile of spit-soaked
sunflower seed shells had inched a bit closer to the brim. Forgive me for
stating the obvious, but it was disgusting. This instructor would also sing
along to the radio, which was distracting all on its own. To make matters
worse, he had the radio tuned to the pop station, so that meant that he was
singing along to the likes of Britney Spears. If you’ve ever been a
fourteen-year-old trying to drive through Brookings for the first time while a
middle-aged man sings “Oops I Did It Again” in falsetto, you know how
uncomfortable I was. If not, then consider yourself fortunate.
All that, though, had the desired end result: I got my
learner’s permit. After three months of driving only with a licensed driver in
tow, my learner’s permit became restricted, which meant that we could only
drive between the hours of 7am and 8pm (which – I think – has since been
changed to accommodate for early morning practices and games that run into the
evening). Then, at 16, I headed back to the DMV to trade in my green coded
restricted license for a red coded under 21 license. (It was blue when you were
21 – unless you had a CDL, and then it was yellowish-brown. Aren’t you glad to
have all this vital information about now-defunct SD drivers licenses?)
That red non-restricted license was a godsend. It meant that
my friends and I no longer had to worry about getting home before 8 – we could
go to the movie that started at 7! We could drive to Sioux Falls and not have
to leave by 630! (Not that I was brave enough for that when I was 16, but it was
nice to have the option.) We could do anything! SWEET, SWEET FREEDOM!!!!!
It wasn’t until I was out and driving with my restricted
license (and later on, my regular license) that I realized just how much
driver’s ed didn’t cover. For example: I got my very first ticket at 14 when I
made a left to park. We didn’t learn that in driver’s ed, but that wasn’t a
good enough excuse for the police officer that pulled me over – I got a hefty
ticket and even lost my license for 30 days. (Since it was a restricted
license, they took it away if you did anything wrong.) But on the bright side,
I’ve never made that mistake again!
My lack of a real driver’s education course became even more
obvious when I talked to my friends and family from other states. My cousins in
Colorado told me about how they had to log something like 30 hours of daytime
driving and 20 hours of nighttime driving with their parents. James (who grew
up in Minnesota) told me about how he and his brothers would set up cones in
their driveway and practice parallel parking. Parallel parking wasn’t covered
in my driver’s ed – there may have been a picture of it in a textbook, but we
certainly didn’t have to parallel park. That would probably explain why there’s
so little parallel parking in Sioux Falls, and when there is, why people are
always parked with either their wheels
on the curb or with five feet in between the curb and the car. I didn’t
actually learn how to parallel park until I lived in Minneapolis and it was a
requirement for survival. Yes: I was 22 years old before I could parallel park.
My gaps in driver’s ed knowledge also came to the surface
when it came time for me to trade in my SD license for a Minnesota one.
Minnesota requires out-of-staters to retake the written test in order to get their
MN license. I took one look at the practice tests and almost died. To say that
Minnesota is more comprehensive than South Dakota is a horrendous
understatement. I studied for days, and even then, I only passed by one
question. But in my defense, the test asked things like “How many feet should
be in between your car and a bicycle when the bicycle is riding next to you on
a city street?” Who knows that stuff anyway??
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