The man handed me a piece of paper but it was the words I heard first. “You passed.” I started jumping up and down and then glanced at the paper. I had only gotten one point off. That was a far cry from the words my Driver’s Ed teacher had said when I finished the course several months earlier. It had all started with that little pink note.
My Driver’s Ed teacher never liked me to start with. As he claimed, I was loud. I also always had my hand raised and he said that was being too much of a good student. “Quiet yourself down,” I was repeatedly told. It especially didn’t help that his class bore me and I found myself doodling on the sides of my pink paged notebook. Yes, I had a pink notebook and I was the only one in class who did.
It was that pink paper that ended up getting me in trouble. The first day of class, I noticed that the teacher never wore any socks with his shoes. I found this to be very interesting and from that day forward, I started checking his feet to see if he was wearing any socks. A couple weeks into the course, I decided to share what I had noticed and wrote a note to my friend Alissa. I wrote Look, the teacher isn’t wearing any socks again. He never does. I wonder if it’s because he doesn’t do his laundry.
I slipped Alissa the note during our break and expected her to read it later. I didn’t realize that Alissa never read the note. She shoved it under her notebook and when class was dismissed, it fell off her desk and right onto the floor. When I asked her about it later, we realized what had happened. We figured the janitor would find it.
The next time we had class, the teacher started class differently. He asked everyone to sit down as he had a story to tell us. He held up a pink piece of paper and I instantly knew what it said. Laughing, he read the note out loud to the entire class. My face turned bright red and everyone laughed. Then the teacher asked me if it bugged me that he was wearing shoes without socks that day. I knew I would never live that note down.
It got worse when he chose me to go behind the wheel with him. He hated my driving and said I did everything wrong. I was told that he had never had a student worse than me. He made me cry many times, and when I did, he told me I was stupid for crying. He always compared me to my friend Chelsey to prove how much I sucked. It went on like this until the last day when, as I got out of my door, he said, “You need to take this class over again. If you try to take your driving test the way you drive, you will fail. You can only get 25 points off, you know!”
Now, having passed my driver’s test, I realized that, without trying, my cruel Driver’s Ed teacher had taught me a valuable lesson. Although people may not believe in you, you can surpass their expectations and do better than you even expected.
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