Biographical Information

I grew up in Vermont. My elementary school education was characterized by much moving about. My father was an officer in the Army and was stationed in Europe and later in Korea. By midway through elementary school, I was in a single parent family although I never thought of that as a risk. Nor, I suspect, did my mother. Nonetheless, we moved just about every year.

I graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, VT in 1960. The teacher in high school who influenced me most was a man by the name of John Fay. For four years, he assigned and diligently scrutinized weekly essays that all students in his classes wrote. During my high school years I played sports and skied. I also worked at Bromley Ski area and had construction jobs in the summer.

I attended Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT, graduating in 1964. I majored in American Literature. In that field at that time, one’s senior year was spent preparing for comprehensive examinations. I recall having two days of written exams and then a grueling three hour session in which all of the professors of the department grilled each student. It was during these years that I married my first wife. We had two children, Owen Keith Bryant and Kendra Bryant Wisch. Owen is a human factors engineer and Kendra has her own counseling practice in Maine.

After an attempt at a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, I returned to Vermont and began teaching English at the Stowe School, a private boarding school in north central Vermont. This was a wonderful but challenging job. I was able to lead adolescents on all sorts of "outward bound" experiences, i.e. camping and hiking trips through the mountains of the northeast and that was wonderful. It was challenging because most of these students had experienced significant problems in school. These were very formative days for me and many of my beliefs about education were learned from colleagues and students at "Stowe Prep."

I left the Stowe School in the late sixties and took a full time job on the ski patrolman at Stratton Mountain Ski Area. It didn’t pay much but I got by and loved being able to ski all day every day. Money and a continued interest in teaching led me to northern Vermont and Hazen Union School. This newly consolidated district had a brand new building and a brand new open area middle school. I became the curriculum coordinator for the language arts portion of the school and taught English. At the same time, I began redoing a pre-Civil war farmhouse with my second wife, Sarah. The photo shows her with the gift she got for her service on the Nebrasaka state Dental Board. The teaching was a great time of experimentation and we became one of those programs frequently visited by other district educators. The farmhouse was an enormous project but we prevailed and eventually had a dwelling that could withstand Vermont winters.

Chopping wood and fighting snow made us think of warmer climates. In the late 70s I applied for and was accepted in Stanford University’s doctoral program in Administration and Policy Analysis. We packed up belongings and rented the farmhouse and took off for California. Eight years and several jobs later, including a stint as the headmaster of a school in Santa Cruz, I earned my degree. During those years Sarah and I had two sons, Ben and Zac. We lived in various places including Woodside and Palo Alto and Santa Cruz. After completing my program, we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and the University of Nebraska. I joined the Department of Educational Administration.

We live in an older section of Lincoln in a Prairie Style home. Each summer we take trips to Wyoming where we camp and fish and hike. We also get together a pretty fair garden every summer. Nebraska's long growing season can make for a lot of produce once you learn how to deal with heat and humidity. There is more reflective information in a file called PersonalNarrative.

Ben is now a medical student at Chicago University. He has completed his two years of coursework and is now working on rotations. Zac is a junior at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland studying English Literature and has taken up rock climbing. My wife, Sarah, and I are both envious of a young man who can travel (and does) so easily about Europe.