Dan Moran
East Brunswick High School
East Brunswick, NJ

"'Literature is news that stays news.' - Ezra Pound. This is the foundation of my courses. We don't read things because they're old; we read them because they're dead-on about ourselves. That's why, for example, when I do 'Taming of the Shrew' I have a 'marriage panel' where teachers and administrators answer questions from the students about marriage."

"His lessons are amazing. In the classroom, his enthusiasm, energy, and love of learning are contagious. His students learn from example. He lives a life that is consumed by learning. He inspires his students (and colleagues) to want to know more and to work harder."

In his literature and creative writing class, Dan's primary goal as a teacher is to have his students empathize with the characters instead of for them. By doing this, he ensures that even the oldest art can teach valuable lessons in today's world. "My classes abound with such empathetic exercises. Once students realize this, the great writers can speak to them as only they can: Frederick Douglass's "Narrative," for example, provokes discussion of contemporary racial identity, Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" becomes an examination of modern politics, and Homer's "Odyssey" asks them to consider their own ideas about parenthood and family life. "Great writers spread the news and I serve as their paperboy," says Dan.

Other Highlights:

• Students created "A Portrait of the Artist as a Teacher." Using a blank hardbound book, each student wrote a few pages in it about what they learned in Dan's course about language, literature, and themselves. Dan, an avid reader, still feels it was the best book he ever received as a gift, 2001
• Favorite quotations that students hear Dan say over and over:

  1. "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." -- Emerson
  2. "All art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly." --Picasso
  3. "Literature is news that stays news." - Ezra Pound.

• "This past May, our local NY ABC news station came to our class to film us in action. We were told it would be on the news that night. Well, that night, my wife and I watched the story from the labor and delivery room of the hospital where my daughter was to be born in a matter of minutes! It was a wild example of school and home intersecting."
• Dan met his wife in the high school where he teaches - she was teaching in the resource room across the hall and asked if Dan could get her an American Literature textbook. When kids complain about coincidences in books, Dan always use himself as an example of how they happen all the time. They now have three children.
• Commencement speaker for classes of 1994, 2002
• Voted best teacher at East Brunswick, 1999 and 2000
• Middlesex County Governor's Teaching Award, 2000
• Princeton University Prize for Distinguished Secondary School Teaching in New Jersey, 1998