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Dear AP Physics 2 Students and Parents,
Happy Saturday! I hope everyone had an absolutely amazing final week of the school year. If you attended graduation yesterday afternoon, I hope it was as beautiful and meaningful to you as it was to me!
Yesterday was, unquestionably, the most difficult day of my life. Saying goodbye, at both the class level and the individual level, was a relentless downpour of raw emotion. Yet within all of that sadness and bittersweet pain were immense feelings of pride and gratitude – and, oddly enough, hope.
I am so ridiculously proud of all of my students – the seniors who have just graduated and the juniors who have just stepped up into their final year of high school!
I am so unbelievably grateful for the privilege and opportunity to teach the subject I love to such brilliant, hard-working, innovative, kind, empathic, hilarious, and caring students. Add to that the truly mind blowing amounts of thanks, support, and encouragement I have received from parents throughout the year, and there are more people and experiences to be grateful for than there is time to write them out – I’d probably lose access to my district email before I could finish typing every single one!
And, ultimately, I am hopeful. Spending this year working with such wonderful students has further cemented my love for what I do. But the sheer volume and intensity of complaints, horror stories, and general insufficiencies was a point of disillusionment – at least at first. After countless heartfelt discussions, thought-provoking lessons, and eye-opening review sessions and debriefs, that disillusion has given way to hope and the belief that we CAN and WILL make meaningful change – for current students and parents and for those yet to come.
I am going to work nonstop throughout the Summer to improve this situation for the good of our students. Whatever it takes, we will work together as a community to do what is right and to ensure that students and parents are seen, heard, and sufficiently supported.
Alongside that, I want to give lessons, lectures, etc on different scales over the break! This past Tuesday, I held our first lecture on Lagrangian mechanics – just for fun and the sake of learning it! It went very well and seemed to drum up enough interest that I would be beyond happy to continue and turn it into a sort of lecture series. I could give them live (wherever we can find space) and even record them so they are more widely available.
Questions for the dinner table:
If you graduated – how does it feel?!
If you just finished your junior year - how does it feel to be a SENIOR?
Anything you’re particularly excited about over the Summer?
How are you feeling about school next semester, come Fall?
For one final time, thank you – for your support, kindness, encouragement, and dedication. I could not be the educator that I am without those like you. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
With all my heart,
Mr. Dunne