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Joseph Schulte, Saint Louis University High School

Acting, Improvisation, Public Speaking

Joseph Schulte believes that “there’s a little Peter Pan in every teacher. We don't want to stop learning. We don't want to grow up.” After 49 years teaching and 57 in the SLUH community (he earned his own diploma there), Schulte still sounds as youthful and as quick with a laugh as he must have on his own graduation day.

That sprightly spirit might help explain why Schulte won the 2006 Educator of the Year Award from the Missouri Arts Education Association. So might his success rate. One of Schulte's former students leads the Screenwriters Federation of America and writes comedy material for Conan O’Brien. Others have gone on to perform professionally on Broadway.

Yet Schulte doesn’t aim to make students want fame; he just wants them to love theater. He knows that the performing arts need more than stardom to keep them going. “It’s fun to see that kind of success, but it’s also rare,” he says. “Overall, we need to train young men and women to be the audience for the future.”

To that end, Schulte tries to pass on a broad range of skills and attitudes. He hides such lofty intangibles as confident humility up his pedagogical sleeve alongside the simplest breathing and movement tips. “You never can tell what a student is going to fix on” as valuable, Schulte says. “One young man told me that 20 years later he still practiced a relaxation exercise he learned from my class.”

Other students have learned from Schulte to see theater as service: “The actor’s major job is supporting the team and the script, the other artists he’s working with, the audience. The individual performer is secondary.”

Listen: Peter Pan is giving lessons in maturity, and he knows what he’s talking about.