Photo: Eze Amos
Ask ChatGPT to profile a driving instructor, and your AI pal may tell you about Dave Rocco.
An amiable, barrel-chested fella with a shaved head and stubbly beard, Rocco began teaching driver’s education during his 18 years as a high school football coach and teacher. After nearly two decades in public and private schools, including a stint as head football coach for the Covenant School and junior varsity coach at Charlottesville High School, Rocco decided to leave the system behind and make for the more lucrative highways of private driving instruction. He spent nearly five years learning the business with the Green Light Driving School, then started his own company, Dave Rocco’s Driving School, in Crozet.
From his position not quite behind the wheel, Rocco has seen a lot through the windshield. He says he deploys the passenger side instructor’s brake during more lessons than most people would think, and he often has to reach over and physically take the steering wheel from his students.
Harrowing near-crash experiences have been so common during Rocco’s tenure as a driving instructor that they no longer bother the husband and father of four. “It is to the point that I may have just gotten us out of a serious accident, and the student is freaking out, and I’m like, ‘it’s okay,’” he says.
The move away from high school students hasn’t helped, unfortunately. According to Rocco, older clients are more difficult to teach than new drivers.
“The older you are, the harder it is to learn, and the more afraid the student is,” Rocco says. “It’s kind of like when you’re a lifeguard and you try to save someone. If they’re scared, they’re kind of trying to fight you and do the opposite of what you want them to.”
One of Rocco’s recent students brought him a unique challenge: She had lost her right leg during her military service. Fortunately, it wasn’t the first time the veteran instructor had faced the challenge. He’d taught a young man years earlier who had no use of his right leg due to electrocution. “You just have to teach them to drive with their left leg, and if they can take the test and pass, they’re a licensed driver,” Rocco says. “My belief is that everybody can drive. You just have to be comfortable and learn in your own style.”
Not every student has to overcome trauma to climb into the driver’s side, but every student is different, Rocco says. With all of them, he tries to experiment and pick up on their learning cues. Indeed, Rocco says it was the cookie-cutter nature of public education (along with the promise of better pay) that drove him into private driver’s ed practice in the first place.
“I’ve tried to adapt my teaching,” he says. “I miss the football aspect of my life, but my heart really is in this business. Maybe that wasn’t true when I started all this, but—along with my family—it has become my life.”
