The Difficulty of Being a Role Model

This prompt gave me some immediate thoughts. First of all, the person who has most positively impacted my life is my wife. Second, I much prefer the company of women to that of men and always have. Third, for every person who might be positively impacted there will be another who is either negatively impacted or not impacted at all.

For most children, your main impact will be from your parents and so you would look at the your Father. Now, I know how difficult the job of doing your best to influence your children is. When you have more than one child, you realise that you do not have a uniform impact on those young people you help to raise. I have the full range of effect on mine from negligible to significant. That is down to the fact that every child has their own nature and that is so much more important than nurture. A different mindset will lead to a different result and your impact will be positive at some points in your child’s life and negative at others.

All of those factors come into play for me as a teacher. As I got older I had to make much more effort to relate to my students and to influence them positively. My impact on them started to diminish significantly in my last few years of teaching, and I felt like I was losing my touch. I know that my influence on most of my students in that time was neutral or negative, but the occasional positive impacts kept me going. Then, last summer I had an almost uniformly positive effect on my entire class. What did that teach me? Well, first of all, it taught me that with the ‘right’ students I could still do it, but second it taught me that with the ‘right’ teacher a number of the students I couldn’t reach would have been positively impacted. The same goes for being a role model in any situation.

My advice? Quite simply to do your best and hopefully that will be enough. If it isn’t, well at least you tried.