Hometown Hero: David Bryan. Educator and Adventurer

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

David Bryan
New Roads School

David Bryan, the Head of School at New Roads School in Santa Monica, has spent most of his life in the classroom.  In thinking about his teaching he said, “Some of the most exciting moments I’ve had have been in the classroom.  To be part of a moment when everyone is being passionate and even ferocious about the same ideas, to help people come together in their shared knowledge, is exciting.  It’s like juggling and then seeing the pattern emerge.”

Teaching started simply as a way to get through grad school without paying.  He was studying Law at SUNY Buffalo.  Law School tuition was high and he decided to ‘go shopping’ to see if he could get some financial help.  He got help from The SUNY Communications Department when they accepted him as a PhD student and paid for all his courses, including the law classes.

Bryan had always been shy and when he found out that to get his tuition paid he would be required to stand up in front of a classroom of college students and teach he almost gave up.   However he didn’t want to lose what he saw as a great opportunity.  So he gathered his courage, went into the classroom and took roll.  He hoped that would be a way into a conversation with his students.

Seeing the name Timothy Leary on the roster Bryan asked the student.  “Are you related?”

The student looked questioningly at Bryan.  He had no idea there was a famous Timothy Leary.   Bryan was somewhat thrown and he jokingly asked the class, “Hey, do you guys know the Beatles?”

The class laughed.  Bryan was relieved.  He was more than relieved.  Bryan said, “I liked the feeling of making the students laugh.  I liked the interaction.  It got me out of feeling uncomfortable.”

By the time he earned his law degree he had come to the conclusion that he didn’t have the temperament for practicing law.  So he taught, he wrote, he worked construction jobs.  Then he and some friends went to Florida to live on a boat and work on boats.

“I lived on a 36’ Morgan sloop in south Florida and in the Caribbean.  Living on a boat makes you pay attention.  There is always the demand of the ocean and that demand is ignored to one’s peril.   You pay attention to the ocean and you pay attention to yourself.  In fact, living on the ocean can be self -absorbing and over time it made me realize I needed to reenter the world.

“I was in the boat and reckoning with the idea of boat life and what’s next and the idea of teaching high school took hold of me hard.”  Bryan started to research what he needed to do in order to teach High School. 

His mother was in California and he wanted to live near her.   “I loved my Mom.  She was amazing.  She could figure out anything, she could fix the dishwasher and the washing machine.  She was smart about money and investments.  She loved her garden, especially her roses and her gladiolas.  She hated housework.  She and my father made it abundantly clear to me and to my brother that they loved us.”

LA Unified gave him a substitute teacher emergency credential.  While he was subbing at LA Unified he was also looking for a full time job. 

He ran into Jack Zimmerman who had been a friend from college days. Zimmerman was by then an educator and a therapist.  He introduced Bryan to Paul Cummins, the Founder and Director of Crossroads School in Santa Monica.  Cummins hired Bryan to teach Crossroads Middle School history, English and the mysteries classes - then an innovative and now a widely used curriculum for teaching human development and ethics.

Part of the ongoing discussion among faculty at Crossroads was how to make a Crossroads education available to all students who wanted it.  It was an idea Paul Cummins acted on and he started New Roads School to do just that.   Cummins formed the New Visions Foundation to provide support for

his plan for the school and for an Educational Village.

Cummins asked David Bryan to be the Head of School at New Roads.  It was an assignment Bryan gladly accepted.  Bryan describes the work at New Roads as “super joyful.  The kids are fabulous.   They come to school because they want to be here and that’s an essential part of a learning environment.”

New Roads is a school that is genuinely diverse – racially, ethnically, culturally, socioeconomically.   Diversity is recorded in School demographics and statistics.  Bryan said the students and faculty have “embraced diversity.  It is lived in the daily life of the School. At New Roads students and faculty cross the invisible barriers that seem to exist in our society even though we all know they have no basis in fact.

“Another measure of our success as a school is that our kids are prepared for college and our students go to colleges all over the country.   Even more important, they are prepared to take the next steps on the path of life,” said Bryan.

After 18 years of being the Head of School at New Roads, Bryan is retiring.  He and his wife, the psychologist and educator Shelly Graham, are moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Right now his plan is to create some space and see what fills it up.  “I’ve had an adventurous life,” he said, “Now I’m doing what I always tell the kids to do, be open to having an new adventure.”

What Say You? Dignity, Autonomy and the Advance Directive

 

What Say You?  Dignity, Autonomy and the Advance Directive

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

Dr. Jonathan Weaver, a member of the medical staff at Saint John’s Health Center, believes “communicating ones wishes for treatment at the end of life is one of the most important discussions you can have.  This can be a conversation with your physician or with your spouse or any person you designate to be your advocate. 

He continues, “It is a discussion that is not frequently done and in fact only 30 percent of physicians polled have communicated their wishes with their own doctor

regarding end of life care.”

Dr. Weaver will discuss a practical approach on how to conduct end of life decisions with your doctor and how doctors approach end of life care for themselves at the St. John’s panel discussion on “End of Life Care.”  Santa Monica Main Library April 16 2-4 pm and April 17 6:30-8:30 pm.  (For reservations call 310829 8453)

Other panelists and facilitators include:  Ross Kino MD, Medical Director, Emergency Services; Brian Madden MD, Medical Director Palliative Care; Nancy Parks, RN, Palliative Care Nurse Coordinator; Cynthia Lane, RN, Director Case Management and Social Services; and Paul Schneider, MD FACP, President, Southern California Bioethics Committee Consortium.

Why care about this?  If you want the physician and the medical staff to respect your wishes when you are in the hospital, if you are unexpectedly in an accident or become severely ill at a young age, if you are elderly and have an illness or a disease, if you want your health care values and beliefs to be respected, it is worth it to care.

An example of when it’s important to have your wishes known ahead of time is with CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation).  When you hear someone talk about CPR is your image one of a TV actor playing a buff lifeguard pushing on a swimmer’s chest and administering mouth- to -mouth resuscitation restoring the swimmer to breath and life? 

That is one kind of CPR.  In the hospital a patient with no heartbeat might need in hospital CPR where their ribs are cracked and the rib cage opened so the heart can be accessed directly.  Emergency or operating room CPR saves lives and is an essential protocol in the hospital.  But is it always the right thing to do?

Is the patient fundamentally healthy but has stopped breathing due to a trauma and can be restored to health or was the person in a serious auto accident, having no discernable heartbeat, and with irreversible brain damage causing the loss of cognitive capacity?  In these completely different scenarios the patient, or the patient’s advocate, must direct the physician.

Physicians make medical decisions and offer medical advice.  Patients have the right to autonomy and the right to accept or reject medical care based on their own health, their values and beliefs.

So how do you keep your autonomy even if you can no longer speak for yourself?  One way is through an Advance Health Care Directive informing physicians of your health care decisions.  Another is to authorize a person to be your advocate when you can’t speak for yourself.

If only 30 percent of doctors think this is important, why should the rest of us?  We have learned form the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study (a longitudinal study following Johns Hopkins trained physicians) that doctors often “forego the same end of life treatments they offer to patients.”  (Doctors Die Differently by Arline Kaplan June 29, 2012 Psychiatric Times)

Ken Murray MD, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC and one of the physicians in the Hopkins Precursors Study, is the author of the Zocalo Public Square essay “How Doctors Die: It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But ItShould Be”

He writes,  “It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

“Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen–that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

“Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery.

“If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night.”

Dr. Murray is clear about his values and has communicated them to his physician and has shared them with us.  For everyone, getting to clarity takes some work.  Hearing from medical professionals might just be a good way to get started in figuring out your own beliefs and values.

What Say You?