Completed traffic school on Saturday. I decided to go with Trafficschoolonline.com to meet my requirements. I was really excited about this at first as I wouldn’t have to physically attend a class and could do everything from home. But there are a couple of caveats which you don’t hear about until later. Depending on your court, you may have to take a supervised test (I did) at a public location like Kinko’s. Also, the course is timed. You have to spend a minimum amount of time on each web page that comprises the course. As far as I can tell, you will spend a minimum of 6 hours on the course regardless of your reading speed or retention. This gets old really quickly.
I found myself constantly waiting 3 minutes or more to go to the next page, so I kept other browser windows open checking out other pages, breaking up the continuity of the course. While this would have been akin to web browsing during a classroom course, and many would see it as a good thing, I saw it as needlessly wasting my time. I am completely capable of absorbing 4 paragraphs of information in 1 minute. Making me have the page open for 5 minutes is ridiculous.
I was genuinely interested in the information offered as it’s been a while since I’ve attended one of these things, and there was some interesting information I didn’t know. But very little of the course material was actually concerned with traffic law. The bulk of the material was scolding males under the age of 25 and drunk drivers. There were large sections dedicated to telling you that people who engaged in road rage were immature and had “weak egos” and other precious jewels of pop psychology meant to guilt trip you into feeling bad about road rage. Most of the course was written in a condescending, patronizing tone that did little to endear me to the material.
I would recommend, given the choice, skipping online traffic school. You will spend the same amount of time in the course. Also, due to a move, they lost my paperwork and delayed my course forcing me to call the court and beg for an extension (had to talk to 2 different people).
In a semi-related note: I walked out this morning to go to work to find that some fine person, drastically in need of improvement to his or her backing up skills, had hit my rear driver’s side door crushing it in and then continued pulling out to extend the damage to the rear corner panel. Of course, like any concerned citizen, they then fled the scene. Scottsdale police blew it off since it occurred on private property. I would like to personally thank the anonymous individual for the $500 deductible I’ll be paying just 2 weeks before Christmas. Way to get into the spirit of things! Happy holidays asshole.