Drive as I say, not as I do.

For 10 hours, this is the job of driving instructors, tasked with introducing teenagers to the rules of operating a motor vehicle on Maine roads. The short period means lessons are hurried, and nominal, as instructors cannot re-create every possible roadway scenario for young drivers to experience.

Like passing slower-moving vehicles on the left, a maneuver with black-and-white rules often treated as gray by many drivers. Instructors, following a state-mandated curriculum, teach young drivers about respecting solid and broken yellow lines, and following speed limits, but it’s sometimes little help.

Because instead of learning to pass responsibly by instruction – in which opportunities are rare – many young drivers learn about this tactic by being its victim. Student drivers are prime targets for aggressive motorists, who speed by these impressionable pupils at will, causing headaches for driving teachers.

“It happens all the time,” said Larry Caron, co-owner of Roy’s Driving Academy in Lewiston. Caron tries to use these occasions as lessons, and asks students to tell him what the offending driver did wrong. But after his 10 hours expire, he “passes the torch” to parents, to reinforce the principles of safe driving.

“We have to have parental involvement,” said Caron. “How am I supposed to teach (driving) right, when other people are doing it wrong?”

Over the past few months, unsafe driving behavior has claimed several young lives along local roads, culminating in the tragedy in Sumner last week, in which a 16-year-old girl – licensed to drive for only two months – was killed in a head-on collision with a school bus.

Police say she was speeding, and overtaking on the left, before the crash. These behaviors are discouraged by professional driving instructors, not condoned by the state’s driving curriculum, and the fear of any parent who has dropped a set of ignition keys into their child’s hands.

Yet it occurs on Maine’s roads all the time.

Each time a frustrated driver, for example, zooms past a slower-moving vehicle with “Student Driver” plastered on its doors, the object lesson for the young operators is the rules of the road are more guidelines, than laws. And then teenagers, whose impressionability is unquestionable, may drive as we do.

Not as we say.

Caron, the driving instructor, says he sees violations of Maine’s driving laws often, everything from tire-squealing sports-car drivers to the absent-minded neglecting to illuminate headlights in the rain, but it’s impossible to have enough police on the road to prosecute rulebreakers.

Inexperienced drivers learn habits by what they see on the road, and with whom they drive. It’s easy to forget this influence while behind the wheel, as parents or motorists, when developing safe, and responsible, driving habits should be a priority. It’s not something instructors or textbooks can do.

Driving safe is up to each of us.