It is an awesome thing to be able to teach tae kwon do to folks. The best, to me, is to be the head instructor ... to be the chief teacher in my own studio. I am sure it is that way for other instructors too. But as a school grows it is natural for the head instructor to hire or appoint assistant instructors to help teach the growing group of students.
These new instructors soon find out that they are no longer simply individual students in the school, but now they have a much higher profile. As Peter Parker says in the Spiderman movies, "With great power comes great responsibility." The new instructor now represents the school he teaches at. That can mean a lot of things, but one thing it certainly means is that the new instructor is a public figure and as such, has to watch how they conduct themselves in the public eye.
Many schools have web pages to show who they are to the town they are located in. Oftentimes they will list the instructors in the school. In today's information rich world, you can find out almost anything about anybody very quickly. That means if I am researching a tae kwon do school and want to know about the instructors, I can find them on the school's homepage. Then I can do a Google search and see everything about them on the internet. Then I can look at their MySpace and Facebook pages to see how they behave with other people. In a day or two, I can see a good representation of everything they have written, seen or said in recent weeks or months. An instructor has to stay aware of the fact that all this material also represents the school they teach at.
Ultimately, this all reflects in their instructor. It is really him (or her) more than the school that they represent.
This post is aimed at no one in particular and everyone in general. It is food for thought. If you are a teacher, it is worth meditating on.
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