In this article, the author discusses what it means to be a teacher and examines the relationship between profession, method, and teacher ethos. To be a good teacher means, above all else, to be different from those whom one has had to live with and endure; different from one's colleague, different from those whom you know everything about, including how they deal with their pupils; and different of course from the horror of the classroom, which the literature has extolled or lamented since time immemorial (Prange 1997). One must have a professional ethos consisting of new beginnings, reform, and being different, in a profession that is ultimately responsible for upholding the hard-won standards of intellectual, technical, and moral culture. To put it even more bluntly: educators get their inspiration from deviating from the beaten path--they follow not a reflected image but a counterimage. The teaching profession operates without unequivocal, comprehensible, and sufficiently simple models. Where such models do appear, and are held up to the neophyte, they are not taken from the school and what it does but from unique and unusual arrangements. [This report was translated by Stephen D. Naron.]