Its a privilege and a responsibility...

All of us as human beings are on an individual path that is inextricably intertwined with others' pathways all around us. We have dreams of what we hope to accomplish, who we hope to become, where we hope to go. We do the calculations and make our decisions along the way.

As teachers we have our own dreams but we are positioned as sentries along the paths of those we teach. As flight instructors we are just a little bit more likely to encounter someone with a big dream, a life changer. For us, our biggest regrets are those moments that we can reflect upon where we realize that we might not have done everything in our power to help a dream blossom; and then there are those moments that passed by where we never even realized that someone was looking to us for inspiration. Totally lost moments...

I am aware of one pivot point in a fellow traveller's life. I asked the casual question: What do you want to do when you grow up? The answer was: I want to be a pilot. The student did not know I was a flight instructor, this was in a totally different educational environment. You should have seen the look on his face when I said: I'm a flight instructor! He later told me that this dream was so personal and lofty to him that he almost did not share the idea with me for fear that I would not understand. Fast forward 17 years later and he is not only a pilot, he and I own one of the largest flight schools in our state! We grew that business from scratch. There are so many more details I could add here to really play up the drama, but it is enough to say that there was an opportunity to either notice or not notice an opportunity to make-a-wish come true.

The moral of the story is simply take a moment every day to remember that you have a responsibility to make this world a better place, we all do. But as teachers we have an elevated responsibility to be alert, be open, be present when someone crosses our path who will look up to us for guidance, direction, and perhaps to help make their dreams come true.