Recently, I became inspired in an unexpected way. I found a dear friend from my long past high school days on Facebook, and on her page, she listed one of her favorite movies as "Waiting for Superman." I had not seen this movie, but it sounded vaguely familiar, so I looked it up. I discovered that it dealt with educational reform. Although I have been a teacher for many years, this was not a topic I had encountered in a thoughtful way since my first full year as a teacher in the inner city of Rochester, New York. Since that time, it always seemed that teaching itself always took up too much time to allow one to think seriously about how to approach the larger issue of educational reform. But now that I am at a crossroads, facing either the prospect of studying for a Ph.D. in theoretical Physics so that I can teach at the college level, or giving up on that dream and returning to life as a high school teacher, it is an appropriate time to reflect on what it really means to be a high school teacher and why anyone would choose this as a profession, and why the old axiom, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," is not true.

Reasons why a good high school teacher can really make a difference. . You may find both old and new space-time-energy pages at

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