Against all odds, the high school I’ve been working with is not only up and running, it is establishing itself as a unique and desirable place for students to prepare for their futures.  They opened the enrollment period last week for the 2010-11 school year, and almost one third of the available spaces are filled already.

                This hasn’t been an easy journey, especially for the staff.  As we are asked to do more with less, plans change and visions are altered while we brace ourselves for further cuts to our bare-bones budget.  The pressure is on, and as always, the stress can produce frustration, short tempers, and blame.  But I’ve also seen resilience, flashes of brilliance, and well-placed humor.  The hard-core professionals among us vent with close friends and trusted colleagues who will help us find solutions and keep our perspective.  The best are able to hide their exhaustion, disappointment, and negativity from the students.  I’ve been criticized for saying that people who work in schools cannot afford the luxury of a bad day.  Teaching is very similar to sales and performance art—the show must go on and the customer is easy to lose.  We are constant role models; our students may forget what we taught them about, let’s say, cell division or a comma splice, but they’ll long remember how we handled ourselves on the job.

                Conducting ourselves as professionals has a far greater importance than mere job security; we need to be mindful of the powerful impact that we have on our students as they develop their impressions of appropriate adult behavior.  A few years ago I read a description of a multimedia presentation titled uBung, written by Josse de Pauw.  The audience faces a large movie screen that covers the entire back wall of the stage.  On it runs a film of a group of adults at a party—laughing, joking, flirting, drinking, and later on, fighting.  Standing in front of the screen on stage is a group of ten-year-olds who mimic the adults’ actions in an eerily realistic manner.  In Flemish, uBung means “practice,” and de Pauw is making the point that children are observers of the adult world—watching, mimicking, and learning.  This is the joy and the burden of the teacher.  Many of us will be remembered as some of the most influential people in our students’ lives, and attention must be paid to what we do and what we say.