While I don't consider myself to be brilliant by any means, I've always been blessed with what you might call "school smarts." Good test scores and grades came fairly easily growing up. Jason is far smarter than I am, as evidenced by his astounding ability to solve a rubix cube. As for the students that I teach at ENS-LSH, they top us both. Having been selected out of a pool of 3000 for 140 spots, these kids are so smart that they actually get paid more to attend school than I get paid to teach them...
Yet what do we all have in common? Our driving record! There seems to be an inverse correlation between book smarts and common sense on the road. I confess that I flunked my driver's test the first time around when I failed to yield and nearly got clipped. My brilliant husband Jason likewise failed his exam when he stopped at a red light, looked both ways to make sure that the intersection was clear, and drove right through.
I felt pretty embarrassed about our driving history until I was talking to one of my students and found out that she was tired from her driving lessons. It turns out that she's already failed her driving exam four times! She has one more chance to pass before she strikes out completely. And this from a girl who I would have imagined had never failed an exam before in her life... I might have thought the situation to be an anomolous until another student came to me yesterday and explained that the reason she had missed class was because she was taking her driving exam...which she failed.
Maybe the government should increase the subsidy they give these kids to cover driver's ed...
* If anyone's feeling nervous about getting behind the wheel this holiday, you can rest assured knowing that our mini-van is safe with my father in Nebraska. (Oh wait, I kinda think he's smart too.)
5 comments:
Actually, the temporary custodian of the Wheeler Honda Odyssey Mini-van is "sortof smart" ... but not as smart as the new sultry GPS voice that guides me around town. I've actually never met this woman who bosses me around when I drive, but she has a calming voice, and never calls me a jerk when I take a "scenic route" or a "short-cut." She does seem to re-calculate routes rather frequently however. I think she was the one who calculated the route of the package I mailed in mid-October from Omaha to Lyon, FR. The package was to arrive in about 10 days, but thankfully arrived today, Nov. 25th (after we had convinced ourselves that it had been hi-jacked by kids book and Sleeping Beauty DVD terrorists).
BTW: I was the one who was smart enough to take Kara to an alternate drivers license bureau right after she failed her first exam ... which she then passed. So her failure was short-lived. She didn't even have to admit it to her friends for years. I cannot recall if I gave her a phone book to sit on so that she could see over the windshield or not.
That's why you just need to go somewhere where the tests are shamefully easy. My drivers ed instructor would just tell us to drive for an hour and he would take a nap...
Don't worry though, I'm not so smart so I'm a good driver ;)
I guess that explains why I passed my drivers test with flying colors, and won the contest for the best parallel parking. (You should have seen the other drivers parallel park, I only won because I didn't hit any other cars or poles - not because I can parallel park.) I've never hit any other cars, but I have certainly hit my fair share of animals.
I don't think I knew about Jason stopping at the red light. At least he didn't get hit . . . :)
Both of us passed our driver's tests with near perfect scores, and we are ticket free too. This explains a lot...
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