GeorgeGaskill Wrote:
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> I have dealt with a couple of people like that; my
> response was I will tell you what to do and why
> and how, but this needs to be a learning
> experience for you.
37 years ago when I got married my wife didn't even know how to drive[1]. I taught her how to drive, including changing tires, and the basics of how cars work. Whenever I had to work on one of our cars for the next 16 years her job was to hand me tools and absorb a lecture on what I was doing and why. At the time I thought of this as preparing her for the likelihood that she would out live me and, having been a gofer in a shop in HS and seen some things, that she would not get ripped off if she had to take a car into a shop.
To make this sort of on-topic, I was teaching her to drive while we were living in Gunnison and several of her longer practice runs involved driving on old grades, including Marshall Pass.
As things turned out we got divorced 20 years ago. Every so often she mentions (we remain good friends) that she had take her car in somewhere and that the mechanics were first dismissive of her report on what needed to be done and later amazed that she got it right. We both get great amusement out of this.
I guess my point is, my father taught all these basic (to me, at least) things as part of his parental duty to me and I taught my wife for similar reasons, a duty to be fulfilled. If parents don't do this, and there is a wide range of things my parents thought they should make sure I knew that I've been amazed that others parents didn't since I was young, then a lot of things just fall between the cracks. We really can't expect the schools to take up the slack here, they already get too many demands to teach this or that for the hours they have in a day. Thus we wind up with people who are legally adult but can't change tire, or balance a checkbook, or any of a host of things I was taught before I was even a teenager!
Hank
[1] Background: Her father taught her brothers to drive at age 10 but told her she would have to wait until age 18 because "Girls were unsafe drivers." By the time she was 14 she was a ward of the state of Colorado. While living in Aurora she took after-school Drivers Ed. Instructor had her, on her first time ever behind the wheel of a car, drive through the Mousetrap in Denver at rush hour. Needless to say, she didn't pass. When I met her she was 18 and no longer even had a learners permit.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/17/2020 11:32AM by hank.
