Driving lessons give teens the confidence and skills necessary to become a safe driver on the road. The professional in the passenger seat will help to clarify all of the necessary rules of the road, and this assisted practice is crucial to a teen’s driving development. Plus, driving lessons save parents from the anxiety and potential conflict of teaching their own kids. While of course mistakes will be made during the lesson, some teens have made far worse mistakes than others. This guide will help teens to learn from those mistakes while also learning how to avoid them themselves.

In 2014, a 16 year old driving student in Ohio killed both himself and his teacher after running a stop sign. The student had rolled through the stop sign and was hit by an oncoming minivan. The minivan’s driver was hospitalized with non life-threatening injuries. Two lives ruined and one severely altered and traumatized all during an otherwise routine Monday morning lesson.

In 2010, a peaceful Oxford town was woken up after a 16 year old flipped her instructor’s car upside-down on a residential street. Luckily no one was hurt, but the car was totaled due to her negligence.

While the above two examples both provide excellent deterrents against unsafe driving, in reality these deterrents are much harder to put into practice. In the first story, two lives were lost due to running a stop sign, and this is unfortunately a common occurrence. Drivers must be calmly alert at all times, and over time, a driver’s eyes must naturally look towards the stop sign area to know whether a sign is present or not. A student driver logically knows to look for applicable signs, but because of jitters and nerves during the lesson, they may forget to follow through. Nerves likely caused the second accident as well due to the fact that it started from a simple overreaction.

Students can avoid these disasters by calmly breathing during the lesson, keeping calm, and by not focusing on “passing” the lesson. There is nothing to pass in the lesson aside from learning the art of safe driving.