Distracted Driving Awareness Month on April, 2024: What is the full process of getting your license in Virginia?

April, 2024 is Distracted Driving Awareness Month 2024. End Distracted Driving How serious are the dangers? Deadly serious. Look at the facts.

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What is the full process of getting your license in Virginia?

If you are having trouble finding this info on the website you aren't trying hard. You can't get your license until you are 16 and three months (and that's if you get your permit at exactly 15 1/2), you do need to go to drivers ed. The driving requirements are met in the class, although you certainly should get more hours with your mom/dad.

Driver Education Requirements

If you are a Virginia resident under age 19, you must complete a state-approved driver education program and hold your Virginia learner's permit for at least nine months.

About Driver's Education

Driver education programs are available statewide to students, adults and out-of-school youths. Public and private school programs are approved by the Department of Education. Driver training schools follow the same course content and are licensed by DMV.

The program must present 36 classroom periods, including components about alcohol safety, drug abuse awareness, aggressive driving, distracted driving, pedestrian and bicycle safety, handicapped parking, fuel-efficient driving practices, motorcycle awareness, and organ and tissue donation awareness. The program must also include 14 in-car instruction periods - 7 periods of driving and 7 periods of observation.

The course must be taken at a public or private driver training school unless you are home-schooled.

You will receive a driver education completion certificate when you successfully complete a driver education program. The driver education certificate of completion is considered part of the driver's license application. A copy of your certificate will be sent by your school instructor to DMV for issuance of a permanent driver's license.

What can we do.........?

What can we do.........?

I think a mandatory period of lessons for driving should be introduced, where people have to do say 6-12 months of driving before they are even allowed to take a test. The main problem seems to be people either not having passed their driving test, drinking and driving, or driving without insurance. Inexperienced young drivers often like to try and give lifts to their friends who then distract them from what should be total concentration. I think that perhaps driving skills or road and traffic awareness (because sometimes it is pedestrians lack that of sense can be responsible for accidents too) should be introduced as a lesson in secondry schools and I wonder whether teachers of the subject should be approached when a person applies for a learner's permit or by driving instructors to check if they agree the pupil is mature and sensible enough to take lessons.

I also believe that if a driver causes an accident that involves the police becoming involved they should be required to attend either a few refresher lessons or retake their test, according to how severe the accident is. I do believe there have to be stricter controls and the police should be given greater powers (and perhaps unmarked police cars in various colours, so they are harder to spot for the drivers and it may encourage drivers to behave according to the highway code because any car could be watching them) to deal with traffic incidents and offences. I agree this needs to be looked at, because most deaths are due to vehicle misuse and a bad attitude toward the driving experience are avoidable and should not be so prevalent in our society.

Teaching dog heel/automatic sit?

Teaching dog heel/automatic sit?

One approach I like for heeling with an automatic sit is to make the correct sit position a really heavily reinforced position, to the point where it is a default position for the dog. Then treat the heeling as just a way to get to another sit, first with only a step or two in between. Don't worry too much at the beginning about the actual heeling- just great snappy auto sits, each one heavily reinforced. Once that's in place, you can use the stopping which signals the sit as a reinforcer for good heeling- so you only stop when the pup is in the correct position, and initially you stop virtually every time he is in correct position. Then you can increase your criteria and require two steps worth of perfect heeling before stopping for the sit, and continue to reinforce the sit, at least intermittently.

What are your goals for this pup? If you really want to be competitive in the obedience ring, I wouldn't be correcting a pup this young- build drive and enthusiasm for the work first. And with a pup this young, he will be growing and getting gangly at various different stages, making him less able to perform both the sit and the heeling correctly, so if you keep correcting him for things he can't control, you'll likely get fallout in terms of decreased enthusiasm, avoidance behaviors, and quite possibly a deterioration in performance.

Three months is still a very young pup- I would be focused more on training some foundation behaviors and teaching him that learning and working with you is fun. Most pups aren't truly stubborn at this age, they just have short attention spans, are easily distracted, and don't know much yet.

At this age, teaching body awareness is something you can do that will have lifelong benefits, and improve your training in the long run. Perch training can help with this, and I've included a video that explains perch training. In the example and explanation the trainer is focusing on agility rather than obedience, but she did obedience first and used this technique back then to improve heeling.

Also on this date Monday, April 1, 2024...