With online school, shopping, games, and working online becoming more and more integrated into our lives, we must decide how to involve ourselves electronically.

Driving can be terrifying and stressful, but at the same time, it can be fun or relaxing. A large portion of proper driving is impacted by your comfort on the road, your familiarity with the road, and the laws you have to abide by.

One thing that can change what kind of driver you are is the driver’s education classes themselves. The school where you choose to learn the laws of the road and how to drive a real car makes a humongous difference.

DriveSafe, a Drivers Education school not far from Creek, is one that many students of Creek attend. There are three ways to do Driver Education: the in-person course, a synchronous video call version of the in-person course, and a self-paced, asynchronous full online version.

The owner of DriveSafe, Ben Baron, explained that while all the choices his company offers, the curriculum remains the same. In-person learning has its advantages. However, he stated that “there’s a little bit more variety to in-person because it’s a mix of group work, discussions, watching some videos and doing some activities.”

Between the two of us, one has taken online drivers’ ed, and the other has taken in-person. This gave us a balanced way to share opinions and conclude what is better to take. We have both agreed that in-person is the better option. One factor that played a part in our decision was how online school went, which was horrific and an intense experience for all students. Both Gabby and I did not prevail under the online school curriculum, in other words, we failed.

However, with the new school year and in-person being our only form of learning, we both are succeeding as students. This is just another example of how in-person learning is much more effective when learning new material. Learning driving material is on such an extreme level that learning it correctly is the only safe way to do so. Considering that when you are driving, you could take someone else’s or your own life, it requires the safest, most reliable form of learning, making the decision of in-person learning being the better option much easier.

Sophomore Corbin Storms agrees that online is not the way to go. Corbin continuously mentions that information is much easier to retain in person, which is agreed upon by most people who are starting to drive. Also, although you may be able to stay at home and relax while working online, the distractions of modern technology are way too intriguing to always stay on task. This is what makes in-person learning much easier to learn the course material.

“While in-person always have the teacher there to help and keep you focused, online learning, as we learned last year, is nowhere near as effective or reliable as in-person,” Corbin said.

With being in person, Corbin added that he could stay focused and obtain information so well that he did not need to study or take notes, and still snagged a nine out of ten on the driver test. Of course, with rowdy teenagers distracting you, in-person learning certainly has its disadvantages. But the long lunch breaks make it well-balanced and more tolerable.

During online school, from our personal experience, you had to take tons of notes and study a lot. However, with in-person coming back, it’s been easier to stay on track without using so many notes. This just shows that online learning is something that we should not incorporate in our driving schools. Well, unless you would like to end up like Thomas’s car at the top of this article.