Bruce Chauncey Reflects on 25 Years at Fay

Bruce Chauncey was originally hired at Fay in the summer of 1992 as a dorm parent and a coach. By the fall, he was working in the Office of Admission, overseeing the financial aid program and interviewing prospective families. Bruce moved into the History Department in 1998, where he taught a variety of grade levels before becoming department chair in 2009. 

Bruce currently oversees faculty and curriculum development for Pre-K through grade nine and teaches sixth grade social studies, which covers the American Revolution and the founding of the republic through the Civil War.

Outside the classroom, Bruce coaches football and lives in the dorms with his wife Kelly and daughters Paige and Piper ‘23. Currently ,he and his family live in the Village Boys’ Dorm with Fay’s youngest boarding boys. 

This year, Bruce celebrated 25 years at Fay, and we caught up with him to talk about some of the changes that he has seen over the years, sharing his enthusiasm for electoral politics with his students, and the challenges of being a dorm parent in a wireless world.

Bruce Chauncey: My first year here, nobody had technology in their rooms. Then it swept through campus, and very quickly everyone had a desktop in their room. A couple years later, cell phones started showing up. Technology is probably the biggest change I have witnessed in my time here, and it definitely creates some challenges in the dorm. There’s something called text anxiety, where kids will actually lose sleep staring at the screen and waiting for a friend to text them back. Some boarding students play interactive multiplayer online games with their friends back in China. So we have to keep a close eye on technology use in the dorms, and we make it clear that nighttime is for sleep. We collect the kids' technology every night, and the school shuts off the wifi.

BC: As hard as it is to manage students' personal use of technology, it has been a great asset in the classroom. I haven’t used a piece of paper in five or six years! There is this incredible flexibility as a teacher knowing that you and the students have access to the same information and the same platform. With assignments being run through Google Classroom and Google Drive, there is no more “The dog ate my homework.”  

BC: I cover the election in some form every year, and I try to get kids to understand how the process works and some of the wrinkles - like how someone could get the majority of the popular vote but still lose the election. For some kids, it will sink in, and for some it won’t. The Lower School mock election that we put together with Tyler Auer and Christine Fearey as our candidates worked so well because it was a sustained activity that physically unfolded in front of the students, and they were able to actively participate in the process. The sixth graders were in charge of the stats and the polling, so it made for a much more memorable experience. In the future, when the students encounter the electoral process again, I think they’ll be more likely to feel that they understand it.

BC: I love being in the classroom, and sixth grade is probably my favorite age group to teach. They have the enthusiasm that you find in younger students but also the maturity, curiosity, and interest in having more adult conversations - and that’s a neat combination. A conversation might be their first exposure to a particular idea, and that’s exciting because you can see the wheels turning and the lights going on. It’s very cool to be a part of those moments.