Notes to a New Teacher (Dana Dunnan)
I met Dana Dunnan 40 years ago when he was a teaching intern at Stanford University and I visited his classes at a nearby high school. He received his Master’s degree there. We reconnected when his recent book was published. Dunnan began as a high school chemistry teacher and then later taught physics, physical science, English and journalism. He also worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a teaching practitioner, helped Massachusetts develop curriculum frameworks and accompanying assessment, and designed curriculum materials used in chemistry classrooms internationally.
This is an excerpt from Notes to a New Teacher. Details on the book can be found at www.chalkdustmemories.com
On top of the thrill, and abject terror, of newness, is the way schools treat beginning teachers. Since those creating schedules have developed relationships with those who they are scheduling, the classes assigned a new teacher tend to be what no one else wants to, or is willing to, teach.
My first year, when I was exclusively a chemistry teacher, I taught five classes in a seven period day. I was the only newcomer in the department, and everyone else taught four classes. Everyone else had their own classroom, and I taught in three different rooms, in three different wings of the building. Each room “belonged” to someone else, with all the territoriality that implies. Each room had a teaching aide, whom the teacher in that room treated as theirs exclusively.
By that June, I was exhausted. Having failed to leave time for exercise, my back was killing me.[1] It is not hard to see why so many people leave the profession in the first three years.
After seven years in science, I got laid off from that department. I had the option of bumping my way into the English department. I was so pissed off at being bumped out of science that I took a year’s leave of absence.
Having no kids, and a wife who was a public school speech pathologist, I could afford the time off. It rejuvenated me, allowed me to spend months with my Notes to a New Teacher (Dana Dunnan) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: