I think I’ve mentioned that Courtney has been going through driver’s education as of late. Her course is in two parts between which she’s supposed to get 30 hours of time behind the wheel and, because I do most of the driving in the family, it was decided that I would be the one taking her out for experience. This is a big change from what I went through some 24 years ago where we got all our required hours of driving in the class itself. One of the things they said she should practice during these 30 hours is parallel parking. We’re some 20 hours along and I’ve yet to have her practice that as of yet simply because I’ve not figured out how to go about it in a way that doesn’t put any vehicles in danger of being banged up.
I don’t recall parallel parking being a heavy topic in my driver’s ed class. Of course during my time instruction was provided by the school system whereas we had to hire a company for Courtney’s classes. The school had a bunch of old beaters they kept on hand for practice and we spent a good deal of our time safe in a parking lot at the school that had lines and such painted on it for just this purpose. I think they had us try parallel parking a couple of times and then it was more or less glossed over. Oddly enough I’m actually quite good at parallel parking despite the lack of training in my youth and have found myself doing it fairly regularly with the trips over to the library when I’m on-call at work. I’ve probably parallel parked more in the last couple of months than at anytime in my life.
Anyway, as I was saying, I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a way that not only doesn’t tie up a street someplace, but doesn’t put the car (or anyone else’s) at risk. Someone suggested getting some traffic cones and going to a school parking lot on the weekend, but it can be hard to see the cones on the ground making it harder than it should be. I thought about maybe hauling some cardboard boxes out and using those as poor approximations of parked vehicles. Then I thought I have this large readership base and some of them must have kids that have gone through this exact same process so I’ll just ask you guys.
How would you go about teaching someone to parallel park?
