Fayston fifth- and sixth-grade teacher Doug Bergstein is retiring this month, and he’ll enjoy his first September off while on the Cape with his wife Alison Duckworth who retired from American Flatbread this spring after 40 years with the company.
Bergstein grew up in Colchester and attended UVM and UNH, receiving a business administration degree with a concentration in marketing. But not too long after college, he found himself moving in a different direction.
“I never wanted to be in an environment where the dollar was the most important thing. After school I led bike tours for Vermont Country Cyclers for a while and I did some traveling. I met a guy in Westford who asked me to talk to his class about my travels,” Bergstein recalled.
He did. And that led to him reffing a soccer game that afternoon and then the same guy asked him to sub. And he did.
“I thought, oh, you know, that was fun. So, I subbed a bit more,” he said. Before he knew it, he was subbing five days a week at all grade levels.
He realized it wasn’t just fun, but he actually liked it. He’d worked with kids at camps and found he was always interested in older kids – not the oldest ones, but the fifth and sixth graders.
He went back to school, taking advantage of a UVM program that allowed those who already had an undergrad degree to take education classes and obtain a teaching certificate.
He took a year of classes and did his student teaching in South Hero with a teacher named Sandy who he was told would be the best person to work with.
“I called her up and I asked her if she would take me on and she was like ‘I don't know I got a really tough class this year I'm not really in the mindset to do it’ and I said look I'm an older student, I know what I want. I want to learn from the best,” Bergstein said, noting that he was 25 at the time.
He said it was a great partnership and he learned a lot from her. He was surprised and excited to learn about a job opening at Fayston Elementary School in December 1990 and carefully prepared and mailed in his application from California where he was visiting his sister. By the time he got back, he had an interview.
He started in January 1991, and he never looked back, working with almost a dozen principals over the years. Fun fact, the current principal is Justina Boyden who graduated from the school and was in Harwood when Bergstein joined the staff. Additionally, some of his first students have kids who have come through his classes.
Asked why he is retiring now, he said he turned 60 this year and his wife had just retired. They wanted to retire at the same time. Because of class sizes and classroom structure at Fayston Elementary School, he’s had his current crop of six graders since they were in fourth grade.
“I thought this was a good group to finish up with. They’re a pretty tight group; it just felt right,” he said.
He and Alison are looking forward to sleeping in (in his case) and weekends off (in her case). Having been involved with American Flatbread since its inception at the former Tucker Hill Lodge, Alison’s career has required a lot of focus on nights and weekends. She was the first employee of that business!
Bergstein will miss the kids he said, and he’ll miss how the teaching slate gets wiped clean not just every year, but also every day.
“One great thing about education is not only do you wipe the slate clean every year but really every day. If you have a bad day, we’re going to start again tomorrow and we're going to cover some of the same stuff. We’re going to review. It’s okay to have a bad day and you can learn from that and move on,” he said.
As teaching has evolved, Bergstein and his peers have moved from all paper to all digital recordkeeping. Their teaching has changed too. Rather than work with the same kids from morning to afternoon, kids move to various programming throughout the day based on their education plans. Learning is more project-based, rather than siloed and it has certainly become more technical and technology based, Bergstein said.
One thing that hasn’t change is his love of teaching social studies because it incorporates reading and writing and history. Bergstein, a staple on the Valley Players’ stage, also loves being on stage and says that part of teaching is like being on stage (except students in a classroom are far more interactive than community theater audiences).
His bio, when he is in a play or working in another capacity in the theater notes that: “In my normal life, I'm entertaining fifth and sixth graders five days a week.”
Kidding aside, and Bergstein does tell a lot of jokes to his students, he works hard to make sure that when his students leave him, they are independent and confident and “recognize that they can solve a problem if they sit down and think about it and persevere.”
“It’s not a lesson plan; it’s the things you do everyday. It’s not letting them rely on me for every little thing, teaching them to do more and more for themselves, giving them the skills and the opportunities. It just builds,” he explained.
As he completes his final few weeks at the school, Bergstein said he never anticipated this would be a career, and said he wasn’t sure when it became one – maybe after 20 years when his co-workers gave him a wooden rocking chair that they’d all signed, or maybe after the first five or six years that were difficult (and usually marks the time when teachers either quit or continue).
He is proud of what he’s done and the career he built, however unlikely it seemed at the start. At Fayston Elementary School, each sixth-grade class graduates and each student prepares a speech. Because he too is going to graduate this year, Bergstein was asked to prepare and give a speech this year.
Tears may be shed.
