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One of the most helpful things to hone my driving skills was taking a couple of one-day classes with the Skip Barber people at Laguna Seca (sp?) in CA. If you're not familiar with them, they basically teach people how to drive scaled down versions of Formula 1 cars. There's classroom work and then instruction in other cars like Neons, Vipers and trucks. You spend a lot of time figuring out the edges of the envelope on steering, brakes, etc. before they turn you loose on a track in a Formula Dodge. There are a lot of things that I picked up there that I use every day, like understanding how the car is going to move in certain situations and how to either get the car to do that or how to avoid it. Not that I drive aggressively, but it helps to be able to think ahead to how I would react if, say, someone cuts me off or the car starts to slide on ice. My attention is also focused much farther ahead than it used to be.
This kind of instruction isn't for everyone, but I think that if more people learned to drive from professionals (and your gym teacher is most certainly NOT qualified as a professional) there would be fewer accidents and much more courtesy. For instance, maybe there would be people that demonstrate some lane discipline.
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