"A teacher affects eternity;
he can never tell where his influence stops."
By Dick Gale, SDEA Executive Director

A warm and friendly 48-year-old woman, Debbie Nytray, walked up to me a few weeks ago and announced that she was a tree hugger, and proud of it. She added that her husband David, who had also taken my American Government class at San Dimas High School, was also a tree hugger and that their three sons were all socially aware young men. She mentioned that all five of them voted in every election.

Teresa Spoulous came up next. A former Psychology student of mine at SDHS, she reported that, after twenty years, she had finally finished her
doctorate in the education of students with disabilities at San Diego State University. And on it went from there for the next four hours.

The occasion was the "That's 70's Reunion" for the San Dimas High School classes of 1973-1978. Students from those years represented a cross-section of my first six years of teaching and visiting with them on that July evening at the Ontario Doubletree Hotel was both a step backward in time and an important reminder about the future.

I spent twenty-four years in the classroom as a high school social studies teacher. I had over 6,000 students during my career and although I would never claim to have positively influenced all of them, the conversations at the reunion convinced me that I had positively influenced at least some of them.

These conversations were enough tosend me back to that September day
thirty five years ago when I first entered my classroom. I was one year re-
moved from college and clearly naïve as to the challenges I would soon be facing. My only thought then was survival, but I also had an overwhelming sense that I was doing something important, something significant, something even life-changing.

Inspired by the reunion, I vowed to spend some time with our newest San Diego teachers and support staff at the SDUSD New Teacher Orientation. Held in late August at the Handlery Hotel, San Diego Unified's latest crop of
professionals moved from room-to-room, picking up pearls of wisdom and advice from some of the district's most knowledgeable staff.

SDEA's contribution to the event was a rapid-fire session covering all manner of teacher rights and responsibilities. It included the occasional "war story" and even some "words to the wise." But it also included time to hear from the audience about their questions, their fears and, most importantly, their hopes. To my relief, their hopes were mainly the same as the ones I
expressed back in 1972. Like generations of educators that have come before them, these new teachers were hopeful about what they would be
able to achieve in their chosen profession. They passionately wanted
to make a positive difference in the lives of their students, although many did not even know on which campus their first classroom was going to be located.

Their sense of idealism and enthusiasm was what struck me most. But at the same time, I wondered how many of these fresh faces would still be
working in their SDUSD classrooms in five years? In the face of lower than average salaries, diminished opportunities for creativity, unyielding accountability systems and disconnected parents, how many would be able to persevere?

This is an important question, not just for San Diego Unified, but for supporters of public education nationwide. It is a question that must be asked and answered on a daily basis, year after year. One of the most astute questioners is the great educational author and thinker, Jonathan Kozol. Kozol has written a dozen books on education in a career spanning nearly forty years. His newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, engages the reader in a search for answers to the essential challenge of how we can
recruit and retain the highest quality teachers.

Kozol estimates that upwards of one-half of teachers in inner-city neighborhoods leave the schools in which they're placed by the end of
their third year. He writes, "The most frequently mentioned reason for discouragement that they express has nothing to do with 'relating to their
students,' with whom they tend to strike an almost instantaneous rapport. Instead, it has to do with the systematic crushing of their creativity and intellect...the cultural denuding of curriculum required by the test-prep mania
they face, and the sense of being trapped within a 'state of siege,' all if which is now exacerbated by that mighty angst machine known as No Child Left Behind."

Kozol's book examines how some young teachers not only survive but thrive amidst these challenges. His conclusion is uncertain, yet hopeful. "Schools can probably survive quite well without their rubrics charts, their AYPs, and their obsessive lists of numbered categories and containers....They cannot survive without excited teachers who take satisfaction in the beautiful vocation they have chosen. Keeping young teachers in our schools is of immense importance, but keeping them there with spirits strong and souls
intact is more important still. If we lose this, we lose everything."

It is my hope that our new teachers and support staff, as well as our SDUSD veterans, feel the pull of the Henry Adams quotation above. I wish you all a year that will impact the future.