Experience is the best teacher, even for teachers.
In his memoir, “The Final One Eighty,” Dennis Donoghue ’79, reflects on the final year of his teaching career in the Triton Regional School District at the top of Massachusetts’s North Shore. Donoghue earned his master of education in severe special needs, though he devoted the last 15 years of his 37 years in the classroom to teaching literacy and geography to sixth-graders.
He saw many changes over the years, as one might expect.
“I would say that once standardized testing came along, life for an elementary school teacher changed for the worse,” Donoghue says. “What came out of this was a distorted sense that the longer time a kid sat behind a desk, whether taking an assessment or prepping for one, the smarter he became. There was more notetaking and less music and art, more ‘time on task’ and less time at recess and gym. What baffled me was how little pushback there was. The teach-to-the-test movement crushed any resistance suggesting there were other ways to get a point across which did not reduce kids to test scores.”
Once Donoghue reached his “final 180” days in the classroom — the result of the state’s RetirementPlus program aimed at getting veteran teachers’ salaries off the payroll — he felt himself freed from public education’s more troubling trends.
“Because it was my last year (thus the title of the memoir), I had the liberty few if any teachers enjoy. I wasn’t going to be fired for not adhering to a curriculum map,” Donoghue says. “I spent a lot of time doing what I enjoyed: reading novels to the kids, having them write sequels to the stories we read and illustrating them, drawing maps of countries we studied, taking them out to run laps around the building, doing meditation and impromptu art classes.”
The experience helped Donoghue take stock of his students and his career. He spent time just being with his students without bias or judgment, and discussing a wide range of topics.
“I quickly came to the conclusion that my last year was turning out to be my most gratifying and stress-free,” Donoghue says.
Donoghue’s time at Lesley coached him to be comfortable with the changeable and unconventional nature of his chosen career. He recalls his professors and peers in the late-1970s, all working full- or part-time jobs, at a time when people with severe special needs were starting to be deinstitutionalized and brought into the education and social mainstream.
“All of us in the program directed by Mary Cunningham had the sense that we were part of a huge shift in the way society looked at developmentally delayed individuals. It was an exciting time,” Donoghue says. “Along with Mary, professors like Tom Taft and Lee and Chuck Vordover challenged us to imagine a world where people with severe special needs were incorporated into daily life. It was our job to figure out how to get this done.
“After class, we would often head to Georgie’s, the bar next door, and over pitchers of draft beer debate until closing. People in the program tended to be older, edgier types. Some had served in Vietnam or the Peace Corps. We worked hard, challenged by an innovative curriculum and talented teachers. We were determined to make a difference and, looking back over those 43 years, I believe we did.”
