Driving Lessons, and School Decisions, for Andrew Part 4

Well, I haven't blogged about teaching Andrew to drive for a while. Partly that was because we were on vacation and he of course could not drive the rental car.

Today though he drove us to The City on the freeway. Woo Hoo!

Yesterday was our first near collision. Fortunately he was going very slowly, making a left turn. He was doing a sloppy turn, where you cut across a lane you should not cut across and someone pulled into that space (where they had every right to be and he did not). He did not respond as quickly as he should have and I grabbed the wheel and got us out of danger.

But it was okay. The other car was stopped and we were going less than 10 miles an hour, so even if he had hit the other car, it would not have caused an injury. But it was a good learning experience -- you have to drive around places other cars have a right to be, even if there are not there at the moment.

He did fine on the freeway today. The traffic was light and though I helped him to merge, it wasn't difficult. He did tend to drive closer to the cars in front of him than I would have liked. It turned out he was trying to keep space between him and the car behind him. Once I got that I explained that he really could not control how close the person behind him was going to drive. His responsibility is the amount of space between him and car in front of him.

He wanted to know if I thought he could pass his driving test before school starts next week so that he could drive to school. I don't think so. He knows everything he is supposed to do, and he usually does it, but he does not have the confidence to do well and pass the test.

Still, he is getting closer.

Anyway, the reason for driving to the city was to see his counselor. The main topic for today was school. He made another appointment to talk to the counselor after one week of school, to talk about how it is going.

I'm glad he's doing that. I don't want any repeats of last year's melt down. I don't know what exactly he and the counselor talk about, but I know that Andrew comes out of his sessions more relaxed than when he goes in. We had lunch after and he told me what schedule he is going to start with and what changes he will make if that is too much. Right now he is looking at doing a full-time schedule (6 classes) for the fall and then just 4 or 5 in the spring.

Like I said, I really like this counselor. He is really good and getting Andrew to relax and figure out what he wants to do. Right now he is going for the three AP classes, Pre-calc, Economics, and Marching Band. If it is too much he can either down-grade one of the AP to regular section or drop band and take PE in the spring (Marching Band counts towards the PE requirement).

That's why the visit to the counselor after one week. He can down-grade the AP on his own, just by asking, but dropping Band would require a note from his counselor.

I do think he can handle this schedule. As long as he is doing it because he wants to and is not feeling overwhelmed by everyone else's expectations.