As you step into your classroom this school year, here's something to think about: your classroom is meant to be an alternate world.
When your students come through the door, they enter a kosmos — a good order, an orderly arrangement. It may be the arrangement of mathematical principles, or the order of history, or the realms of visual art, or the constellation of literary genres and themes and fictional worlds.
Whatever you teach, you've got to think of it as more than a subject. It's a world. A cosmos. A realm which, apart from the work you'll do with your students this year, they'll not be able to enter.
You, regular old you, when you teach a regular old science or Phys Ed lesson in your regular old school — you're doing something much deeper, tapping into something much more magical, than meets the eye.
So teach toward mastery. Guide your students to know and be able to do as much as they possibly can in the realm in which you teach. Push them, as all the best guides do, with warmth and authority.
Stoke the fires of zeal in your heart. Remind yourself that you're a guide to the cosmos of your discipline — a cosmos that, apart from your work this year, your students will not have access to.