Quote Originally Posted by tulip View Post
Good for you for teaching your daughter to drive standard transmission. It's so important to be able to drive stick shift cars; you never know when you might have to drive one even if you choose to drive an automatic.
I never even RODE in a manual-transmission car until I was in college, and I've still never driven one! I think this has something to do with stick being a bit annoying in big city stop-and-go traffic, and there was certainly more than enough of that around Chicago. Almost no one I knew drove cars with a stick (though several of my friends did learn on relatives' cars--I had no such access). I would LOVE to learn, if I could find a friend who would trust their poor clutch in my newbie hands (foot?).

Good luck to your daughter (and you!) Melavai, and yes, I think in the end she'll thank you for teaching her to drive in a "difficult" car! I feel that way about weather: I got my learner's permit when I was 15 and took driver's ed starting in January, which does not make for good street conditions in Chicago. So though I missed out on the benefits of learning to drive stick, I do have the advantage of having learned to handle a car while the roads were icy and slushy.

I remember my first time behind the wheel was in the forest preserves, and I actually asked my mom which way I needed to flip the turn signal lever if I wanted to signal one direction or another (you'd think "in the same direction you turn the wheel" would have been intuitive enough....)