Nineteen out of twenty-five. That was the number on the slip Garrett carried out of the Highway Patrol exam station on March 3, and he handed it to me the way you hand a waiter a credit card you suspect is maxed out. Missouri wants 80 percent on the written test, which is 20 right. He was one question short.
I didn't say much in the parking lot. I remember failing a test or two at that age, and I remember that the drive home was worse than the test. So we drove home, I asked if he wanted tacos, and we talked about it the next day.
What the test actually looks like
For anyone whose kid is about to turn 15, here's the short version of how it went for us. You go to a Missouri State Highway Patrol exam station, not the license office. There's a vision screening and a road sign test, and then the written test, 25 questions on a screen. Garrett passed the vision and sign parts without trouble. The written part is where it got him.
He missed six. Two of them stuck with him because he knew he'd guessed. One was about following distance. The question gave a few choices in seconds, and he picked the shortest one because, in his words, "that seemed like the normal amount." I have driven behind a lot of people who would have picked the same answer. The other was a sign question, a yellow warning sign he mixed up with a different one. The other four he couldn't remember, which told me something too.
If you pass, you take the paperwork over to the license office to get the actual permit. Tina handled that part the second time around. She is better at offices than I am. I tend to stand in line looking like I'm waiting for a part that's on backorder.
The five days in between
Garrett had read the state driver guide once, front to back, the week before. That turned out to be the problem. Reading it once is like reading a repair manual once. You remember the pictures and not the numbers.
So we changed the method. Nothing fancy:
- He went back through the guide one section a night, with a pencil, and wrote down every number he found. Distances, seconds, feet, speeds, ages, hours.
- Tina made flash cards of the warning and regulatory signs from the guide's pages. Shape and color on one side, meaning on the other.
- At dinner, Lainey quizzed him. She was 12 and took the job very seriously. She also kept score.
- We talked through why the answers were what they were. Following distance is about reaction time and stopping distance. Once he saw it as physics instead of trivia, the right answer stopped looking long.
I also told him something my dad told me in 1995, which is that the test isn't trying to trick you. It's checking that you read the book. Most of the questions are lifted pretty directly from the guide, so the guide is the study material. Not the videos, not the practice apps his friends swore by. The guide.
Five days later, on March 8, we went back. Same building, same chairs, a different person at the counter. Garrett was quieter than the first time, which with him is saying something. He finished, walked out, and held up the slip without saying anything. He passed with a few to spare, and he got the following distance question right, or a version of it, because he told me in the truck, "It was the three-second thing again."
Then the license office, then the permit. Then a teenager holding a laminated card in the passenger seat of my Silverado and asking, before we were out of the lot, "So can I drive home?" No. Not on the day. We had a plan, and the plan started in an empty parking lot.
What I'd tell another parent
Failing the first time was fine. Honestly, it might have been good. He took the second round seriously in a way he didn't take the first, and the stuff he studied that week is the stuff that actually matters on the road. Following distance is not a trivia question when you're doing 60 behind a pickup with a ladder in the bed.
The other thing: don't make the drive home a lecture. He knew he'd failed. He was standing right there when it happened.
Now the real work starts. Missouri wants 40 hours of supervised driving before he can get an intermediate license at 16, and 10 of those hours have to be at night. I'm a dispatcher. I think in logs. I have a notebook in my truck door with every fill-up since 2016. So yes, there will be a log, and yes, I already bought a second notebook for the glovebox. We'll run it till it tells us otherwise.