I was young and foolish once. Some would argue that I’m now older and still foolish, maybe even more foolish in some regards. However, there are some lessons I have learned over the years, and thankfully I figured them out before it was too late.
Recently, our student body was given a reminder about how to drive more safely on our local roads. There had been too many reports of our driving population flying up and down the highways and byways, passing people in a reckless manner, and endangering others, both in their car and in others on the road.
If you’ve been around our communities for any amount of time, you know that we’ve had more than our share of tragedy due to driving accidents. I know our drivers’ education instructors remind student drivers of this all the time; none of us want to see the list extended of lost or dramatically changed lives.
Highway 30 recently was changed to a 60 MPH speed limit for most parts. It seems only a matter of time before all of Highway 13 is the same. Now, in reality, many people already went 60 MPH on those roads. Does this mean they should now go 65? Of course not. 60 MPH is now deemed safe, maybe because so many people were doing that anyway. But much faster and the road could become quite hazardous. I know some people would like a local race track, but I’d prefer it was off our main roads!
So I sat back and thought about when I was a teenage driver. No doubt about it, I made some poor decisions at times on the road. I was always in a tremendous hurry. If you were going the speed limit, you were going too slowly. I was in a perpetual state of passing. There was more than one occasion when I was probably lucky not to get in an accident.
It’s amazing what happens when you have children. Suddenly, there are other lives that you are responsible for. My driving improved dramatically at that point. But now we need to continue to focus on getting our drivers to make better decisions before they reach that point. If they don’t, there’s always the chance they’ll never get to be parents.
Another issue we see in the news a lot lately is the increase in kids smoking, drinking, and vaping. The vaping is especially disturbing because scientists are really not completely sure about all the long-term impacts that can have. They’ve really come out and said it’s a bad idea, maybe even worse than cigarettes.
So why do kids vape? Part of it might be that it’s easier to get away with. You know if someone’s smoking in the boys’ room, but vaping is a little harder to detect. Smoke from a cigarette sticks to your clothes, but there are easy ways to dissipate the smell of vaping.
Teenage drinking continues to be a problem, and I’m not sure how that can change. It seems like all of us can remember drinking parties when we were underage, no matter how old we are now. I don’t hide the fact from my own kids that I drank before I turned 21. That wasn’t the best choice to make, but I hope that I can encourage my own kids to make responsible choices.
Much like with driving, after my children arrived, it became more important that I be even more responsible. It’s a tough lesson to learn that you may want to sleep in after hanging with your friends and imbibing a bit the night before, but your baby will get up whenever he or she wants to, no matter how you feel! And I’m glad for that lesson from my kids.
A final lesson I didn’t learn too late involved getting work done. In high school, I’d get my work done, but if it was a long-term assignment, I usually got it finished at the last minute. I still did well, but I look back and think I could’ve made my life a lot easier by starting sooner.
When I went to college, I continued in that habit. You’d often find me in the computer lab late at night tapping out that paper that was due the next day. I’d known about it for two weeks, but there was always a Tecmo Super Bowl video game to play or a friend to visit in another dorm.
Finally, my junior year, when I was really embedded in my core classes, I looked at my schedules and realized I had four 10-page papers due in a three-week span. Oh oh. I started early on what I thought would be the toughest paper, one for my Modern Drama class. When I needed a break from that, I’d work on a different one.
But I got the drama paper done a week before it was due and had a chance to sit down with my professor to go over it. In the end, that was possibly the best paper I wrote in college, and I used that technique the rest of my last two years.
I’ve tried to teach that idea to my students. Most of my assignments are not due tomorrow, but you have a list to work from for the future. Trying to work on organization and not waiting until the last minute is at least as valuable as putting a comma in the right place.
I’ve learned a lot of things in my life. I suppose I could fill a column with what I haven’t learned yet, but that might end up taking more than one week!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is ullage, which means the amount by which a container falls short of being full, as in, “The cook quickly learned to double-check the ullage in the measuring cup after his recipe didn’t turn out so well.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!