Just try it the way you’re shown
Yumi Sanderson often tells her students, “Not slowly. Calmly.” Drive too slowly and you hold up the traffic around you; rush, and your field of vision narrows.
What matters, she says, is to move smoothly with the flow of traffic and drive with a relaxed mind. The quickest way to learn? “Even if you’re thinking, ‘What is this lady going on about?’, just do what you’re told and give it an honest try.
Driving is a skill. If you keep practising the way you were taught, it all adds up,” Yumi says with a bright smile.
In Canada, though, learners go straight out onto public roads. Isn’t that nerve-racking for student and instructor alike? “I can usually tell what a student is going to do next. But once, just once, a student slammed on the brakes out of nowhere on a perfectly ordinary stretch of road.
That really gave me a fright.” She checked behind her in that instant and was relieved to see no one there. Every day she makes the same wish: “Whatever ups and downs my students go through, I stay calm, and we finish the day with no accidents.” “You can do it, I know you can. See? You did it.” Yumi has been helping people get their licences for 34 years.
Some students pick up driving with ease, while others let their nerves show behind the wheel. One woman had once been a passenger in a car that crashed. She needed to drive, so she started lessons, but the trauma of the accident stayed with her.
With Yumi taking her through each step and encouraging her all the way, she slowly overcame her fears and grew in confidence. On the day of the test, Yumi went with her to the test centre and waited. When she came back, she told Yumi in tears that she had passed.
“Lots of people think getting a licence is easy, but some people have a real mental block about driving. If they’re taught by someone who doesn’t understand that, they shut down and can’t do things they’re perfectly capable of. That’s why I feel what I do matters.”
As an instructor, and as a mother
At the urging of people around her, Yumi once took a job as a driving examiner.
“When someone told me they were hiring examiners and asked if I’d apply, I said, ‘There’s no way someone like me would get in.’
And they said, ‘You never know.’ Hang on, I thought, that’s exactly what I always tell my students.” The examiner’s job was less demanding than teaching, and for the first time Yumi, who had always put work first, had room to look at herself and the people around her.
She noticed that her children were emotionally young for their age, and realised she had been leaning on her supportive husband for the housework and neglecting her family.
“Part of me had been telling myself that earning money and giving them a comfortable life would make my children happy. But in the end, it left an empty space in their hearts.
I was raising human beings, and I realised how much I needed to keep my eyes on my children even while I was working. Late as it was, I knew I had to start filling that loneliness.”
She left the examiner’s job and went back to teaching, where she could set her own schedule. This time she didn’t work alone, but shared an office with a Chinese-Canadian colleague, Alfie.
Now Yumi comes home from work, cooks dinner and listens to her children.
Raising children and teaching driving, she says, come down to the same thing: put yourself in the other person’s shoes and guide them sincerely. That is what she reminded herself when she started this new chapter.
News from former students who are out driving and enjoying it keeps her going, as she carries on toward the goals she shares with her students.