A Status Check

By David B. Cohen

I enjoyed my high school experience, but the prospect of attending my 20-year reunion generated little enthusiasm for me. If I hadn’t seen any of my classmates at all in the past two decades, I might have approached the reunion with greater anticipation, but it was the encounters I’d had in the intervening years that left me ambivalent.

The problem is, I am a high school teacher. Somehow, meeting my classmates at various events over the years, I found it hard to make my career sound as interesting or important as everything they had done. Having launched careers in business, law, medicine, real estate, technology, academia, politics, arts, and entertainment, my classmates seem to have excelled in every way imaginable. Over the years, in my occasional encounters with the class hot shots, I’d been subjected to stories of commercial and corporate ascendancy that left me feeling professionally inadequate.

So I started off thinking I’d save myself the trouble and expense of traveling to the reunion. Nobody would really want to talk to me anyway; everyone went to school, so they think they know all about teaching. Why should I subject myself to more career-one-upsmanship when I’m just a high school teacher? Whatever we teachers tell ourselves and others about the importance of our profession, it can be hard to steel ourselves repeatedly against the perceived...