This article appeared as "A Gratitude Tour” in the Summer 2026 issue of Independent School.
After 43 years in the classroom, Dan Dunsmore didn’t mark his June 2025 retirement by slowing down. Instead, the longtime Blue Ridge School (VA) educator set out on a personal “gratitude tour,” reconnecting in person with the people who shaped his life in education.
Dunsmore spent most of his career teaching English and study skills, including 26 years at Blue Ridge. What stayed with him, he says, were rarely moments tied to a lesson plan. “The students, of course, are who kept me in this often unpredictable, never-dull profession,” he told colleagues in his “last lecture.”
Now, he has turned that perspective outward, reconnecting with former heads of school, colleagues, students, and even high school classmates to express his appreciation. He has also made time to visit his older brother—his first role model in many ways—and someone who has given 47 years to teaching.
So far, the tour has taken him to Annapolis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlottesville, Durham, Knoxville, Madison, West Lafayette, and Virginia Beach. The itinerary has been personal, but the approach is simple: Show up, offer a beverage as a small token of thanks, and listen. Dunsmore then documents each visit, writing “to thank them … and to show the remarkable impact they have had on education and on me.”
What began as a series of visits has grown into an active writing project. Dunsmore has completed 22 short chapters, with five more underway, each focused on a person or gathering and the often-unseen ways educators and mentors shape one another over time. While the settings and stories vary, the throughline remains constant: Teaching, he argues, is a human relationship before it is a job description.
That belief also anchored the “last lecture” Dunsmore delivered during his final year of full-time teaching, where he reflected on a career that included both sleepless nights and the joy of watching students find confidence. He spoke about early lessons in student teaching that revealed how deeply students respond not just to instruction but to care—and how quickly teachers are called to become counselors in moments of collective crisis, from the Challenger disaster to September 11.
He urged colleagues to keep learning alongside their students, to admit mistakes, and to resist turning classrooms into pulpits: The goal, he says, is to help students form their own opinions and recognize their strengths, especially when they’re struggling.
Through the gratitude tour, he hopes to “plant more trees than I’ve cut down,” borrowing a proverb about educators planting shade they may never sit under. His travels and writing are a reminder that appreciation doesn’t have to wait until retirement—and that a teacher’s impact is often measured in the quiet connections that linger long after the last bell.
Photo: Retired teacher Dan Dunsmore (right) and Trip Darrin, head of school at Blue Ridge School, reconnect in September 2025.
Photo credit: Kathrin Darnell
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