“If I had a motto it would be, ‘Excellence is a journey, not a destination.’” That was the conclusion of new McIntosh High School Principal Lisa Fine, who assumed her role Dec. 1.

Fine brings with her more than 4 years as the McIntosh Assistant Principal, experience in teaching math at Rising Starr Middle School and 13 years in the airline industry.

“Education is my second career,” Fine said of her seemingly divergent career experiences that actually share fundamental similarities. “A business background helped me in education. It gave me a global perspective, especially in administrative positions where you work with so many community groups. Education and the airlines are both public relations jobs, and with education I’m working with a different age level. With both, the ability to communicate is very beneficial.”

Education in America today, and the many conversations surrounding it, are replete with assessments of student and teacher performance, evaluation methodologies and funding realities. Yet what is often left out of those conversations are the all-important philosphical underpinnings of the teaching mission. Fine was quick to address this critical element, tying it in to the mission specific to Fayette County schools and McIntosh.

“Teaching is the most important job of all. It creates all other jobs. Students graduate with the knowledge, motivation and the work ethic to pursue their dreams,” Fine said. “The results of education are not always immmediate. Society expects immediate results, but we have to look at the long-term. The teacher’s reward is what the student becomes, not what the student learns through instruction.”

Fine added that ongoing changes in society and education result in the need that schools adapt continuously. And for McIntosh, a three-time School of Excellence winner, its new principal believes that adaptation is tied to the ultimate objective of teaching.

“My vision is that I teach, inspire and model. It’s a responsibility to leave the world a better place because of your presence, because of who you are and what you’re doing as a teacher,” Fine said, adding that she is also a proponent of the team approach to management. “McIntosh is not a one-person show.”

And the role of a teacher, Fine said, is one that requires that students be exposed to cognitive challenges, ones that do not always conform to the relative assessments of the status quo in a discipline or in society at-large. Her viewpoint sounded much like that of Plato in the Allegory of the Cave, in which one of the lessons learned was that teaching is not a matter of dumping facts into a student’s head, but is instead, a matter of pointing the way.

“We like to be comfortable in the way we live and think and act. It takes a great person to lead anyone out of their comfort zone,” Fine said. “Teachers who lead the way have to expose students to current topics, challenge them to think independently and work collaboratively so they can function inside society’s rules and at the same time use their abilities to forge new territory in all fields. And we’re educating students for jobs that don’t exist yet. So we teach innovative thinking, self-discipline, a good work ethic and skills that can be used to be productive. We teach students to question, debate and find answers. This is education. We teach theories, the discovery of patterns in things and challenge students to find answers to the question ‘why.’”