Play hard, work hard.  That’s what I’ve always heard – that there is a time to work and a time to play.  I’m all for play myself.  When I retire, one day, way in the future, I hope to play a lot.  But in the meantime, I work hard at a profession that is held to a high standard, perhaps a higher standard than any other profession.  You see, I and my colleagues are responsible for the future of generations.  We are highly educated, highly motivated, and deeply passionate about what we do. And yet, as much as we are held to a high standard by others, we’re not always treated with the respect one might associate with other professions.

I include my profession with any other profession that might require a college degree.  I have spent years in higher level institutions studying my craft.  I even had to pay to do what might be referred to as an internship in other professions.  I have continued to study at professional in-services and conferences, flex sessions and workshops.  Anyone else in any other profession for the 27 years as I have, would be looked up to as an expert in their field. But for some reason, we are always questioned, held to a higher standard than just about any other profession and subjected to accountability “busy work” that undermines our self esteem and wastes the time we could be using to focus on students.  All for a salary that should make it apparent as to what our real motive is for staying in this profession, because it certainly isn’t for the money.

So here is where I’m going to get a little hard on our profession.  I have shared that if I could get away with it, I would live in jeans and t-shirts.  That’s my personality.  However, I dress in a way that any other profession would consider professional.  Well, except for casual Fridays, but even then I tend to try to dress up the jeans a bit.  You see, I believe it’s hard for the public to judge us a professionals if their impression of us is anything but.  When a parent walks into a school and a teacher is wearing something that a teenage fast food worker would wear, it leaves an impression.  And when we post things on social media that include inappropriate language or behaving in a way that a parent might consider questionable, it leaves an impression.  Unfair perhaps, but reality.  And when we attend a conference where we are supposed to be learning and honoring the best we have to offer as educators and we turn it into fun and games for others both inside and outside of our profession to see, we make an impression.  All we’re doing is making things harder for ourselves.

I feel like I have spent my entire professional career trying to convince people to take education, and in particular, music education seriously.  I have advocated in Nebraska’s state capital and on capitol hill.  I have served on boards learning about and teaching advocacy to help our music educators and their students.  And yet we’re shooting ourselves in the foot when we don’t expect more out of ourselves in terms of professionalism.  If we don’t expect more of ourselves, how can we ever  expect others to respect us or our profession?  I believe treating ourselves with a little more dignity can help our cause.

I’m afraid that a lot of us look at the word dignity and think old and stodgy.  But it covers so much more than that.  The definition includes:

• The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect. A composed or serious manner or style. A sense of pride in oneself; self-respect

It comes from the Latin meaning “worthy”.

So, being dignified is more of how we view ourselves and therefore present ourselves to the world as educators.  If we’re to take ourselves and our profession seriously, we must consider ourselves worthy of respect and treat ourselves that way.  That means paying attention to the details that project that image to others.

And perhaps the concept of decorum is dead.  It is certainly a lost art.  It seems today that everything has to be “fun” and “exciting”, but that kind of atmosphere isn’t always appropriate in every setting.  There are certain places where dignity and decorum are not a bad thing.  It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself but save the yelling and whistling for a football stadium, not a concert venue or professional conference.  There are times and places, just like there is time for work and a time for play.  Decorum is defined as behavior in keeping with good taste and propriety.  This doesn’t mean you have to be stodgy, but there are times in our lives that if we want to be taken seriously as professionals, there are cultural and societal norms that must be met.

Now, some of my musician friends may be foaming at the mouth here because as musicians and artists, we don’t necessarily want to fit a mold and most of us hate being told what we should do.  That’s part of the reason we became musicians in the first place. We didn’t want to be engineers or doctors or lawyers.  We choose to be educators.  But with that decision comes outside expectations as to how we should behave and we need to be aware of how we want to be perceived as individuals and how we want to represent our profession.

There is a shortage of teachers right now in this country, a lot of which has to do with how our current political climate has demonized public education.  However, I believe we can turn that around if we begin to treat ourselves as worthy and treating ourselves in a dignified manner.  Then perhaps our young people will want to be part of a great profession that garners respect because we respect ourselves.