There are a great many teachers in the world, and most of us care about our students.  We are proud of their accomplishments, and we worry about their missteps.  We hope for the best for their futures.  All of this is true of history teachers, math teachers, English teachers, even gym teachers.  But it is especially true for driving teachers.

We have the unique responsibility of training young minds to control a weapon of mass destruction weighing more than a ton at speeds up to a hundred feet per second.  We train young people to try to survive an activity that kills about 31,000 people every year – an average of more than 80 people daily.  We teach them not to make the mistakes that create millions of car crashes, and that leave millions injured or disabled annually.  We teach them to use their still-developing minds to process information and react to emergencies in a fraction of a second.

We cannot doubt ourselves in our mission.  We teach life-and-death decision-making all day, every day, and we risk our own lives in the process, turning our vehicles over to untrained hands and minds and entering the fray with a smile.  And, sometimes, we have to make hard choices.

Tonight, I had to tell a young man that he was not ready to drive on his own.  Tonight, I had to tell him that the driver’s test we have scheduled for him next week would be postponed a while.  What makes this difficult is that I’ve known this young man for several years, during which time we’ve taken many drives together.

Tonight, a week before his test, I found myself concerned with the number of mistakes he was making.  At slow speed in a parking lot, he misjudged the position of the car and scraped into a stop sign and a curb.  At several two-way intersections, he failed to judge a safe gap in cross traffic.  As I logged my concerns on his review sheet, I went back and reviewed detailed notes from the past two years, and realized there were still holes in his judgment that I couldn’t ignore or let pass.  I had the sinking feeling that, if he earned his license, he would cause a crash within a week or two.

I’ve had this concern a few times before.  The question is whether to hold the student back, or let them test.  My thought is always, “what if he passes?”  I often tell my students that the driving test is easier than driving in the real world, and easier than just about everything they do with me.  So, there’s a very real chance a student could pass the driving test before he/she is really ready to be out there alone.  Heck, it happens every single day.

Twice in the past, I’ve expressed concerns about a student’s skill level or judgment, but I’ve let them take the test anyway.  I expected the examiner to see what I saw.  I expected the student to make a mistake.  I was surprised to see both pass on their first try.   I hoped I was wrong about their readiness, but I wasn’t.  Within three months, one had totaled four cars in two separate crashes.  The other voluntarily quit driving after a year – thankfully, with no crashes, but having rarely driven because of attention and focus issues.

Those I’ve been proud to take to the test have been driving well and safely for years, and their ranks grow every month.  We are all unique snowflakes, and no two of us learn in exactly the same manner or at the same rate.  Some people accomplish in years what others can do in months.  There’s nothing wrong with either, so long as everything has been learned.  So long as the judgment is sound.

When they leave me, my students pocket their driver’s license and pull out onto their first road by themselves.  At that moment, and for the rest of their lives, every second they are behind the wheel they risk injury and death.  This is the responsibility driving teachers have that few other teachers experience, and it is the hardest part of our job.