Chris Meyer Five Questions With...

From the townhouse on West 74th to Gaynor today, Chris Meyer has witnessed many milestones in Gaynor’s history. And what better time than the 60th anniversary of Gaynor’s founding to ask about his journey at the school? He joined the faculty in 1997 and has been in the Blue Cluster ever since!

What was your journey into teaching and how did you find yourself at Gaynor?

Teaching was a career change for me. After college I started working for an educational media company in marketing, and worked my way up to head of marketing for the publishing division. I spent a lot of time traveling around, doing trade shows, meeting with teachers and administrators. Then my dad, who was a dentist, retired from a successful dental practice and went back to school to get a degree in special education. While he was going through his program, just talking about it with him got me interested. So then I went to Hunter and got my masters, and I got into Gaynor by kind of a fluke really. I was talking about [student teaching] in class and another classmate overheard my conversation and said, I'm student teaching at this school and there's an opening, why don't you call the head of school and do an interview? So I did and then I got in. It was a lucky, lucky break.

How have you seen the school grow and change during the time you’ve been here?

When I started, we were in a five story brownstone and my room was probably 25% the size of this room! Of course I see how there’s been change in the size of the building, the technology, we have smart boards and Chromebooks. Back then, we had a chalkboard and one iMac for the whole group including me to share and, you know, ten kids and two teachers jammed into a small space makes it tough. I mean there were maybe 98 kids in the school back then and 13 teachers. So we've definitely gotten bigger. But I don’t think it's changed the essence of the school. It's still got that small community vibe that it always kind of had, and I think it's important to maintain that effort. Our size has not taken that away, we haven't become an impersonal institution. It's still a real community and a place of warmth and friendliness and camaraderie and collegiality.

What keeps you coming back to work every day?

I think Gaynor is a great school. I love the mission and the curriculum that we teach, I love the way we teach, I feel like we're always looking for new ways to do things and trying things out, but there's also a lot of consistency in the way we approach education here. I like the people I work with, the Blue Cluster’s a really talented, really good group of people. I just really like working with these people and the kids are just great, I mean it's just fun. It’s a fun job, I enjoy the job and I've never felt the need to leave, I’ve never felt the desire to go anywhere else. I mean, I commute an hour and a half each way at this point, because I moved further out east in the last 26 years but it doesn’t matter. I enjoy it.

You were in the first cohort of the new Senior Educator Program. Why did you decide to do the program?

Well, I liked the sound of it. I think they were still developing it and figuring out what it was going to be when they presented it, but I thought it was interesting that they were doing this, that they were providing this kind of further education opportunity. I liked the idea of working with [school leaders] in that kind of setting and I thought that it would be interesting to learn new things, kind of freshen my way of doing things, maybe seeing a different perspective on how to teach, some different approaches. And I also felt that being here for as long as I’ve been here, it would be kind of an example to be part of the inaugural year of the program to support it, and maybe other people down the road will [be inspired to do it too].

I've enjoyed the experience. As someone who's always worked with the Blue Cluster, it’s great to be able to meet with my mentee who works in Silver and just get a better sense of what's going on in the lower clusters; how they teach, what their kids are like, what their program is like, and to see the trajectory of where the kids are going to go just by having conversations about what they're doing. I hope it's been meaningful for my mentee, but definitely it's been a very interesting and an eye-opening experience.

What are you up to when you’re not at Gaynor?

I live in the basement of the building with all the other teachers, you know, plugged into the wall, [laughing]. Actually, we got a dog just before spring break, we got a puppy that’s about five months old. And so most of our time now has been spent with the dog. So I go home and we play with the dog and we go for a walk and we go to puppy classes on Saturdays. Right now it's been about the dog. Also the spring is a great time; we like to garden and I like to spend time outside going on hikes, getting a little bit of nature, we like to go to the beach and stuff like that. I'm looking forward to more of that if the dog permits me!