The Ambivalent Motorist

In the spring semester of my sophomore year at Vista High School I took a Driver Education class,
which was run by Mr. Dennis Williams
and was highlighted by a series of after-school behind-the-wheel driving lessons
that in my case were chaperoned by Mr. Henry Landis,
per a California state requirement for getting an instruction permit to drive a car.
FYI: Vista High School has not offered Driver Education classes for at least the last several years.

I got a driver's license shortly after my 16^th birthday. I failed my first behind-the-wheel driving test - I made a critical error in the course of making a left turn, if I recall correctly - but passed on a second attempt.

Car-wise my family had
(1) a Volkswagen Squareback and
(2) a Kombi-type Volkswagen Bus
in the late 1970s. Almost all of my teenage driving experience was with the Bus as the Squareback was my father's 'baby' and he was touchy about letting me or anyone else in the family drive it, although I wasn't too upset about that as the Bus handled beautifully and was a pleasure to drive.

Motorist to nonmotorist

I left home for college shortly before my 18^th birthday, and for the next ~33 years (excepting the summer of 1981) I lived in large cities - Cambridge/Boston, Philadelphia, London, and New Orleans - in which I didn't do any driving at all. As a practical matter, it just wasn't necessary for me to drive in those cities, and being a nonmotorist was the easy thing to do - gas, traffic, parking, maintenance, insurance, registration, smog certification, who wants to deal with any of that? - if you don't have to drive, then don't.

Be that as it may, I renewed my driver's license every four years through the mail until 1994, at which point the California DMV sent me a letter that in part read:

It will be necessary for you to apply in person at any office of this Department for renewal of your driver license. A $12.00 fee and all necessary tests will be required.

Doing this wasn't feasible as I was in England at the time, and my license expired.

Fast-forward to late 2013 and my return to Vista, a suburban-in-character city in which a walk from my home to the nearest grocery store takes a lot longer than it formerly did. (I was going to say that the mass transit here leaves a lot of room for improvement, but that's true pretty much everywhere, isn't it?) Still without a license, I relied for a while on my elderly father to drive me around but, as recounted in the Perambulatorily yours section of my "Sods and Odds" post, this came to an abrupt halt in March 2015. Now what?

Nonmotorist to driver's license 2.0

Well, I have finally gotten my act together and gotten a new driver's license. I had been a nonmotorist for so long that the California DMV no longer had my original driver's license number in its database and had me take both a written test and a behind-the-wheel test.
(w) I took/passed my written test at a temporary, now-closed DMV office in San Marcos on 29 December 2015. (It's too bad that the 1706 Descanso office wasn't kept open as it was the one closest to my home and was easy to get to via the 305 Bus.)
(btw) I took/passed my behind-the-wheel test at the DMV office in Oceanside on 4 November 2016; my nerves got rattled a couple of times during the test and I didn't do as well as I would have liked, but I did squeak through.

"What's with the time gaps?" I was afraid you would ask that. Inertia and procrastination on my part deserve a healthy share of the blame although the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the registration, smog certification, and insurance for my father's car all lapsed in 2015 - more details to come in the following entry.

English 10-

Today's post will conclude my retrospective tour of the English classes I took in high school.

10^th grade

For the September-to-January ("fall") semester I took an English Composition 10A course
and for the February-to-June ("spring") semester I took a Literature Appreciation 10A course,
both of which were run by Mr. Jeffrey Paul Jones.

Mr. Jones made a serious effort in the fall semester to teach us the basic mechanics of writing - how to construct various types of sentences and how to put those sentences together so as to create a coherent unit of content - and I'd say he did a pretty good job of it.
(I've saved a number of sentence tests from this period as they display my maladjusted teenage self in all its glory. A 1 December 1977 test asked for three sentences having an introductory present participial phrase so I wrote:
1. Running down the street, Billy got hit by a car and his guts were splattered on the Jones' driveway.
2. Blowing his nose, Tom broke his Kleenex and a large glob of snot fell on his homework.
3. Coughing very loudly, the class thoroughly shattered the teacher's concentration.
Ah, those were the days...)

We read one class novel in the fall semester and one in the spring semester -
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, respectively -
excellent choices if I do say myself.

Twice during the fall semester we played a game in class that I'll call "N-Dimensional Story Creation". Here's how it went:
Mr. Jones handed blank sheets of paper out separately to several random students, each of whom
wrote down a sentence that started a story and
then passed the sheet to an adjacent student, who
wrote a sentence that continued the story in some way and
then passed the sheet to a third student, who wrote another sentence for the story and passed the sheet to a fourth student, etc.
Toward the end of class Mr. Jones collected our stories-in-progress and read them back to us. This was great fun, and I encourage all English teachers everywhere to try it in their own classes.

Two more points:
• I wrote a report and gave an oral presentation on Rosy Is My Relative by Gerald Durrell (a choice stemming from a Durrell short story that I read in the 8^th grade) in the fall semester.
• À la Mr. Hunter and The Propaganda Game, Mr. Jones had us play Diplomacy in the spring semester. Wikipedia notes that Diplomacy is Henry Kissinger's favorite game - we don't need to say any more about this, do we?

Lagniappe: 9^th grade

Back in the 1970s Vista High School encompassed grades 10-12. For grades 7-9 I attended a Lincoln Junior High School that in 2006 moved to a new location and is now called Rancho Minerva Middle School. Meanwhile, a Vista Magnet Middle School has opened at the previous Lincoln Junior High School site.

At Vista High School it was up to us to work out a schoolday schedule; at Lincoln Junior High School our schedules were determined for us. For the 9^th grade I was assigned to an English 9G course that was run by Mrs. Barbara Ross. I still have for this class a written notebook (content-wise, it was very light on grammar and heavy on dreams and imagery, I'll spare you the details) that grew into a traditional, long-form journal, of which both of my blogs are outgrowths. We read one class novel during the year, that being The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Not related to coursework:
Mrs. Ross was a Neil Young fan. One day she brought in her copy of Harvest and played some of its songs for us and gave us her take on their lyrics.

Loose ends

• The "G" of English 9G refers to a "gifted" program in which I had been placed several years earlier by the Vista Unified School District's 'powers that be'. I don't have anything nice to say about that program so I won't say anything at all.

• Barbara Ross was Barbara Christiansen when I was a 7^th-grader; she was my English teacher that year too.

• My 8^th-grade English teacher was Miss Martha Lindey. Miss Lindey moved from Lincoln Junior High School to Vista High School in 1979; I could have and perhaps should have taken a journalism course from her when I was a senior.

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We'll get behind the wheel in our next episode.