feature stories
'Survivor'
Dec 6, 2007 3:11 AM
Teacher’s book reveals how he made it through his rookie year
At the tender age of 22, Dan Brown spent the 2003-04 school year teaching 4th grade in a hardscrabble section of the Bronx with a class of extremely diverse, challenging students. Not an extraordinary experience for new teachers.
But Brown, a film student who took a teaching job fresh from his New York City Teaching Fellowship to pay for living on Manhattan’s hipster-yet-expensive Lower East Side, did one thing besides enter a lion’s den. He wrote about it.
“The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle” is Brown’s saga of how he survived. And how his students thrived.
It’s a gripping, well-told story about “my world’s gutsiest heroes and desperately flawed shortcomers,” and Brown, who came to the UFT to tell it as the guest speaker at a Nov. 16 new teacher event sponsored by the Teacher Center. He was also there to sign his book and greet this year’s newbies and exchange experiences with them.
Teacher/author Dan Brown signs a copy of his book for Francesca Florio of PS 132, the Bronx.
UFT President Randi Weingarten, who introduced Brown and shared the stage with him, said that “very few people understands how hard it is to be a teacher. One of the reasons I loved Dan’s book is that he speaks in very real and recognizable terms about what goes on in the classroom and at the school level.”
About that first day: “They’ll tell you it’s like reading a book or sailing, but you’ll be all alone on the ocean, with no Coast Guard and a sinking ship,” Brown cautioned. His audience, already teaching for some two months, applauded in recognition.
After a year, he left the system, a victim of one assistant principal’s animus — his sin bulletin-board nonconformity — and general harassment.
“I was emotionally exhausted,” he said, though he admitted conflicting feelings about leaving. He plans to return in the fall of 2008 with a newly minted master’s degree and “teach somewhere in the school system again.”
Summing up his first year, he said, “On the one hand, it was a life-changing situation. On the other, it’s troubling that I’d become a statistic, one of so many leaving after a year.”
He also admitted an upside to leaving: He thinks the book couldn’t have been written if he’d stayed in the system.
“There’s no way you can write a book and teach. It’s near impossible to do it with the summer off,” he said. “You need the summer to recuperate.”
Brown smiles as UFT President Randi Weingarten meets his former student, Sonandia Azcona, one of the book’s chief heroines.
James Martin, chapter leader at Brooklyn’s Middle School of Marking and Legal Studies in Brooklyn, told Brown about his own teaching odyssey.
“The first year was bad,” he said. “The second year was worse. In the third, I became a teacher.”
Trisha Pierson, a dance teacher at PS 85 in the Bronx, Brown’s old school, said she’s happy he’s planning to return to the system.
“He had friends at the school,” she said. “We told him it would get better. It’s not just that the kids get better, but you get better.”
Another veteran added, “Remember, Dan, it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon.”
Weingarten was asked by a young teacher, “How do you tell your students that you’re a professional, because I’m 23 and 5-foot-3 and look 18.”
Weingarten replied that she herself was shorter than that. “I taught 11th- and 12th-graders and all my students were taller than me.”
She said the trick was to know your stuff, have a presence, and keep consistent and fair expectations and rules of conduct. “Make it clear that you like them,” she said, “but that you’re not their buddy.”
A hard-cover edition of “The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle,” published by Arcade, is listed at $25.95.
Brown’s former PS 85 colleagues — (from left) Rachel Blum, Trisha Pierson, Christie Barron and Allison Malt — enjoy the event.
