The Joke
I have a running joke in class. If a student's late getting back from lunch, I'll turn to the instructor with a straight face and ask, "Did you scare off another one?" Everybody laughs. It gets the room going again after a break. But somewhere in that joke, there's some truth I don't think about often enough.
The Student Who Didn't Come Back
Years ago, I was working with a corporate client at the Skid Control School — I believe I was still at the police college at the same time, though that part doesn't really matter. I had a student who fought me on everything. Argumentative from the start, resistant to every instruction, unwilling to perform even the basic exercises. I remember running through the usual instructor checklist in my head that morning: Did I offend her? Is this just her personality? What am I missing here?
Then lunch ended, and everyone came back to the car except her. No call. No explanation. Nothing.
In all my years doing this, she is the only student who has ever left a course partway through without a word — no family emergency, no valid excuse, just gone. I'll be honest: the rest of my day went easier without her in the car, and once the school didn't say anything more about it, I didn't think much more of it either. One difficult student, gone. Move on.
The Phone Call
Three days later, the manager of the school pulled me aside while I was out training and asked me to call her.
I had no idea what it was about. When she picked up, she told me her therapist had encouraged her to make the call — to say out loud what had actually happened that morning, and to apologize to me directly for how she'd behaved.
Then she told me why.
One of the exercises had me asking her to aim the car directly at a fixed point across the road — a sign, maybe 30 seconds ahead of us. A completely routine visual-target exercise, the kind I've run hundreds of times without a second thought. But every time I gave her that instruction, she wasn't in my car anymore. She was somewhere else entirely — reliving a memory of once trying to take her own life by deliberately driving straight into a tree.
I don't remember much of what I said back to her. I know I thanked her for the call, and for the apology. But I hung up the phone with far more to sit with than she did. She'd done the hard part already, with her therapist, before she ever dialed my number. I was the one left turning it over.
Every drive I've run since, I've thought harder about what I'm actually asking a stranger to do when I hand them an instruction that seems, to me, completely ordinary.
When It Resurfaces
That was a long time ago, but it hasn't stayed in the past. It resurfaces every blue moon — maybe four or five times over the course of my career — usually on the skid pad, the first time a student feels the car lose grip and start to spin out.
Most people just get startled. That's normal, and it passes. But every so often, it's something else entirely. In my experience, when real trauma surfaces in that moment, it tends to show up differently depending on the person: women are more likely to cry, men are more likely to get angry and defensive. On at least three occasions, I've stepped out of the vehicle, sat with the person on the side of the pad, and learned they'd survived a serious crash years earlier — as a passenger, usually, with no control over what was happening to them.
What I've Learned to Do About It
There's no single fix, because it's rarely the same problem twice.
Sometimes the answer really is just speed — take it down, run the exercise slower, and let the student rebuild trust in the car at a pace their body can actually accept.
Sometimes it's not about speed at all. It's about understanding. The student needs to actually know why the crash happened to them years ago — what physics were at play, what could have been done differently — because without that, the moment on the pad just repeats the helplessness of the original crash instead of replacing it with anything useful.
And sometimes, more than anything, it's about giving them a mental reset. I'll tell them something like this: when that first crash happened, you didn't understand why. You just knew something terrible occurred and you had no control over it. Now that we've worked through it together, you understand why and how it happened — and more importantly, you know what to look for and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
That reframe alone does something. It turns a memory they've only ever experienced as something that happened to them into something they now have some command over.
What This Means for Us as Instructors
None of that fits neatly inside a training schedule. There's no lesson plan block for "student may be reliving the worst day of their life right now." But if we're going to put people behind the wheel and deliberately push them toward discomfort — because that's genuinely part of how this training works — we have to be ready for what discomfort actually is for some of them.
"Push through it" is a fine instinct for someone who's just nervous. It's the wrong instinct for someone who's somewhere else entirely. The only way to tell the difference is to actually watch the person in front of you, and to be willing to stop the exercise and ask, rather than assume you already know what you're looking at.
I still make the joke about scaring off a student. I probably always will. But I don't make it lightly anymore.
On a different note —
Five weeks from now, I'll be in Atlanta at the ALERT International conference, co-presenting with Brett Cowell on hazard perception and commentary driving. If you're in a position to attend or send someone from your agency, it starts September 7. Click registration below.
If you found this useful and want future issues, you can subscribe here:
https://evoc-insider-e5d7ed.beehiiv.com/
Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon