Personally, the most essential ability for the high school teacher would be the ability to help students plan for the future since this ability can not only benefit students greatly but also help the teacher maintain discipline in the classroom.

High school students are at a point of change in thinking, that is to say, they start to think beyond the present. However, in most cases, they only have an ambiguous goal and don’t know exactly what to do to achieve it, due to lack of experience. If the high school teacher can offer them some useful suggestions like what major to take in the college and what resource is available, it will make it much easier for them to fulfil their dreams. Let’s take one of my friends as an example. He wanted to be a doctor after graduating from college, but he didn’t have enough money for medical school, plus he was unwilling to take the loan. As he was in a sorry plight, his teacher came up with an idea for him: join the military to receive the educational benefit upon leaving. Now he is studying at medical school and thrilled that he can pursue his dream. He would have given up if it had not been for a creative teacher who knew possible options and developed a satisfactory solution.

In addition, there can be real, serious issues of ill-discipline in high schools. Different from adults, who can focus on the tedious job, teens get bored from time to time, teens can easily get bored, and if they aren’t interested, they won’t bother trying to fake it and will get on with whatever they want to do. So, to keep the class in order and to improve teaching efficiency, high school teachers should give priority to making sure that students are interested in the lesson. One good way is to let students think about their future and find inner motivations. Suppose that if one student sets his mind to be an engineer and fully understands the job requirement under his teacher’s advice, he will be more likely to concentrate on math and physic class.

From those reasons, we can safely conclude that for students’ overall development, helping them plan for their future is the most crucial ability that a high school teacher should have.