Photo by Madeline Burger
You may have seen her walking down the hallways, huge white purse swinging by her side. You may have seen her in the back of one of your classrooms, headphones in her ears and a paper on her desk. Or, maybe you’ve just heard the name: Ms. Dana Shusta-Brown. With her reputation for hard grading and multiple essays a week, she inspires either fawning devotion or powerful apprehension in her for¬mer students. But there’s more to Ms . Shusta-Brown than her work. She’s a writer, a very competitive a t h l e t e , and a loving mother of a twelve-year old daughter.
Ms. Shusta-Brown didn’t always want to be a teacher. She started off in broadcasting and media, working as a desk assistant for Channel 3. A friend of hers invited her to work for a show called ‘Teacher TV.’
She remembers, “We’d go all over the country and we would interview students and teachers. So I was respon¬sible for interviewing students, he was responsible for interviewing teachers, and then we would put together a package and all. I just found that closer and closer to graduation, I was spending more time with the teachers during our off time.”
Eventually another friend sat her down and told her, “You’re always gravitating towards the educators, you know you might want to think about this.” She followed the advice to the letter, worrying for a month over her decision before finally deciding to return to school and get a masters degree in teaching. “And I have never ever looked back,” she confides.
So besides all of this teaching, what else does Ms. Shusta-Brown do? “I play piano– not well, but I have a tremendous teacher. That’s what I mostly do.”
Any family? “I have a twelve-year old, so I often go to her basketball games. And she’s a drummer, so we do lots with both band and orchestra. Since she’s getting older, she likes to go shopping and all that stuff. It’s really fun.” Her enthusiasm for her daughter is contagious, and I feel myself smiling in tandem.
Finally, I decided to broach the hard question– Ms. Shusta- Brown has a tattoo of a dolphin on her ankle, and I’m about to ask about the origin. Expecting a story about a scandalous night back in her college years, I’m surprised by the real an¬swer. “It’s sweet. I like the reasoning behind it. I got it when I was twenty-nine—it was a birthday gift to me. I always liked the idea of a tattoo, but I didn’t want to get it anywhere where as you get older its not so attractive. I knew that I wanted it on my ankle, because I always thought that would be fun and I could cover it during job interviews and things. But when I was going for it, it was instant that I wanted a dolphin. I always loved swimming; my daughter, her favorite toy was a dolphin– that was one of her first words– so I instantly knew that was what I wanted. I remember when I came home from getting it; she was thrilled that I had gotten a dolphin. I do love that it’s some¬thing really sentimental, because of her.”
Well, there you have it. Ms. Shusta- Brown is a closet sweetheart. Under her tough, competitive exterior lies a softie who just wants to make her daughter happy.
Since I’m always on the prowl for new books to read, and I currently have an Eng¬lish teacher held captive, I take my chances and ask for a book recommendation. “Well, I don’t have a favorite book, but I do have a favorite author. José Saramago.”
Why is he so good? She tells me about the first time she read a book by him. “It was just so interesting because it’s really dense, it was the first book, I think, that I felt so driven by the words and his lan¬guage versus the character or the situation and it was through the words that he really developed the character and the situation.”
With all of her literary expertise, will Shusta-Brown break out the pen herself? “I’m hoping after next year; I would like to get back to writing creatively. I like short fiction. That would be my genre.” So should we expect the name Dana Shusta–Brown to appear on a book spine any day soon? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Elizabeth Dunoff
Class of 2011
