The Pingry School

It’s a strategy he spent several years perfecting, even before he arrived at Pingry. Mr. Poprik’s first career was on Wall Street, as an early trader of credit derivatives. Their arrival on the financial markets scene coincided with Mr. Poprik’s. As a recent business school graduate, he was called upon to explain them—to graduate students at NYU, Columbia, and Wharton (his own alma mater) as well as to new hires in the firm he worked at. “I liked being able to break down a complex subject to the level of the people I was speaking to, so that they wanted to learn about it and could understand and relate to it. That’s what you do when you’re a teacher.”

Naturally, it wasn’t long before Mr. Poprik found his way into the classroom. By emphasizing applicability and logic over straight mathematical theory, he prefers to start with the problem, only then layering in the math and leading his students to the answer. So, it’s not surprising that many of them find connections to math in their other courses. Take, for example, the boy who passionately explained to Mr. Poprik a conceptual framework he designed to apply calculus to history, and analyze troop movement during wartime.

“I feel unbelievably fortunate for the kids we teach at Pingry. They have such an innate intellectual curiosity that is so refreshing to be able to engage with on a daily basis. You never know what kinds of questions they will ask or observations they will make,” he remarks. “It can make your day because the next thing you know, you want to know the answer!”

A varsity starter on the lacrosse team since her freshman year, and co-captain her senior year, Olivia is equally animated when talking about her teammates and playing for Big Blue. In the pivotal, state sectional finals against Mount St. Mary’s her junior year, she scored in the fourth quarter to tie the game, and clinched her 100th career goal in the process. “That was a really special moment for me,” she remembers. Moments later, the team celebrated a victory, their first state sectional championship in more than a decade.

When Olivia first came to Pingry as a freshman, she wasn’t quite as sure-footed. She recalls feeling scared that she would feel separate from the “other kids,” students who had been here longer. “But, there were no barriers at all. It was extremely welcoming.” Three years later, what about Pingry most inspires this scholar athlete? “There are so many different people who have so many different interests and come from so many different backgrounds here. There’s so much you can take away from the people you meet. That’s happened for me at Pingry.”

A two-time all-state selection and Central Jersey Player of the Year in high school, Mr. Murdock would go on to a successful collegiate career at Providence College, including an appearance in the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament, followed by six years of professional play overseas. When he broke his foot on Yao Ming’s size 22 shoe during a game in China, which required three surgeries over the course of a year to correct, he was forced to rethink his future.

“It was the end of my professional career, but it was an opportunity to pursue a different career in education,” he remembers.

Now a Middle School history teacher, Admission Counselor, and Head Coach of the Boys’ Varsity Basketball Team, Mr. Murdock has been making an impact on Pingry students, in various capacities, for a decade.

“I’ve always viewed education and coaching in terms of developing young students or athletes, providing them with a set of life skills that will take them beyond the walls of Pingry—how to be part of a team, how to work hard through adversity and demonstrate resilience, how to be proud of accomplishments and appreciate those moments. It’s gratifying to see young people develop into their full potential,” he says.

Indeed, he shares the story of a prospective Middle School student he met with in the Admission Office many years ago, who, along with his family, voiced concern that Pingry would be too difficult for him. Sitting with the student, allowing him to share his strengths and weaknesses and discover that he had more to give than he thought, is what Mr. Murdock cherishes most in his work.

So, after college, he headed West, where he earned a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona while serving as editor-in-chief of their literary review. He then worked for a year at Johnson & Johnson, where he served as Quality & Compliance Communications Specialist. In 2015, Pingry’s Office of Institutional Advancement was looking for a writer to help wordsmith its many communications, from donor impact stories to Campaign appeals. He landed the job, and delighted in working in an educational environment. Not a year later, when the Middle School was looking to fill a vacancy, the “front lines,” as Headmaster Nat Conard has called it, beckoned. In the fall of 2016, he had his own classroom, as a Grade 6 and Form I English teacher.

“When I transitioned from Advancement to teaching, it was an opportunity to go from writing about Pingry's best qualities—its emphasis on community, inquiry, and collaboration—to actually rolling up my sleeves and doing the work of engaging students,” he says. He was on the front lines indeed, and he was loving it.

Now a Form I Team Leader, overseeing Form I programming and faculty, what does he enjoy most about being a Pingry teacher?

“Pingry provides not only an education—any school can do that—but also a space for teaching students how to be stewards of that education,” he replies. “It’s not just, ‘Here are the tools to succeed in the world,’ but also, 'How are you going to brandish those tools to better your community?' As an English teacher, you get to push students to step outside themselves and imagine the lived experience of others. You get to remind them, and yourself, that before we are students and teachers, we are world citizens and human beings.”

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A mechanical engineering student in China, she relocated to the U.S. for a banking job after college, and moved on to a position in computer programming. She then pursued a master’s in computer science from NYU, and joined a start-up, where she did project management work. Juggling family life and career demands, she decided to change her course. With both of her daughters enrolled at Pingry at the time, she became increasingly involved in campus life, substitute teaching for one of the Chinese teachers on a number of occasions. When Pingry was in search of a second full-time Chinese faculty member, they immediately turned to Mrs. Hao.

“I never imagined I would be a teacher, but I have no regret at all,” she recalled. “Pingry is a very uncomplicated environment in that all hurdles are stripped away; teachers can really focus on being productive.”

After five years teaching at Pingry, the eagerness and interest level of the students still impress her: “They ask questions that even I, as the native speaker, don’t know the answer to!”

Mrs. Hao has also become a cultural ambassador for the school, leading faculty and student trips to China, organizing Pingry’s annual Chinese New Year celebration, and rallying Pingry’s Asian community to share their perspective. She treasures this sort of human interaction and impact, which she doesn’t feel the computer science field would have afforded her to the same degree.

“Helping students to acquire language skills is the critical part of my job, but being able to influence them in other ways is so meaningful,” she says. “Helping them to understand another culture—how another human being experiences life differently—really helps them to learn about themselves.”

Fittingly, Ms. Sullivan is co-director of the Green Group and Outing Club, and she teaches Pingry’s Environmental Art class, one of the only K-12 schools in the country to offer such a course. Her task? Attuning students to the wonders of nature, and the ways in which their nearly 200-acre campus can serve as their palette. A few years ago, Pingry supported her participation in a summer residency in Italy on “best practices” for environmental artists. Not long after, she spearheaded the construction of Pingry’s first outdoor classroom, and worked with other members of the faculty and students to create a multi-purpose campsite in the woods, complete with five tent platforms, which can sleep up to 20 people, and a hiking trail, four-tenths of a mile long.

More recently, she traveled with a group of Pingry faculty to Santa Fe for the Independent Schools Experiential Education Network (ISEEN) conference, exploring additional techniques for applying experiential teaching and learning to the classroom. The conference advanced her ability to incorporate STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) initiatives into the classroom. (She already teaches technology—digital filmmaking, Adobe Design programs, and 3D printing—in many of her arts classes.) This support of professional growth, and the school’s flexibility in allowing for cross-disciplinary collaboration and experimentation with curriculum, fuels her passion as a teacher, and as an artist.

“Pingry is a ‘yes’ school,” she notes. “If you have a good idea that you’re passionate about, you are given the tools you need to realize it.”

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It’s that same collaborative, interdisciplinary focus that allows her to engage her Kindergarten class in STEAM projects (STEAM projects are routine in later grades, but she wants to see them trickle down to her youngsters as well). As an example, using the book, Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, she brainstormed with her kids how they could “save” a snowball; that is, prevent it from melting. After detailed discussion, experimenting, and prototype-building, the class presented their findings at an all-school meeting. “It really took a village,” remarked Mrs. Udeshi. “The art teachers, the tech teachers, and the Kindergarten team were all involved, and to see kids who were non-readers at the beginning of the year competently read and present their work to the entire school was really remarkable.”

These types of creative, cross-disciplinary projects are what excite her, and keep her passionate about her work. “We, as Pingry teachers, get to choose what we think is best practice. We are constantly questioning, bouncing ideas off each other. It’s truly a talented group of faculty.”

During an “open house classroom” for prospective families recently, a parent asked, "Would you still teach if you won the lottery?" Without hesitation, she answered yes.

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Ravenous with ambition and motivation, in his words, he was the 2015 winner of the nationwide Warren Buffet Grow Your Own Business Challenge, all before graduating to the Upper School. Out of a field of 5,000 competitors across the country, he was one of five finalists flown to Omaha to present his business idea—“Beyond the Books,” an online haven for learners of all ages looking for extracurricular knowledge—to the Oracle of Omaha himself. (His classmate was also a finalist, and yet another Pingrian was a semifinalist.) To be sure, Miro is an independent, ambitious learner. Academic compromise is not in his vocabulary.

And at Pingry, the varsity water polo player and science lover—he was the only freshman selected to the school’s science-based, research-oriented Journal Club—has found his home, along with many kindred spirits. “The upperclassmen really inspire me,” he says. “I’m looking up to my sophomore and junior friends who are achieving so much, and I want to keep that cycle going for others at Pingry.”

In seventh grade, he and a friend wanted to launch a Middle School math club. He had worked hard to test out of his seventh and eighth grade math courses, and was one of six in his class to earn admittance to higher-level, more challenging ninth grade math with Ms. Thuzar. Proud of his accomplishment and brimming with excitement over complex geometry proofs, starting a math club seemed like the perfect outlet to his enthusiasm. While the two friends conceived of the idea too late in the school year, they were encouraged to try again the following year. Lower School math specialist, Verna Lange, even agreed to help them.

A piano player since the age of 4, he also grew curious about Pingry’s formidable organ, housed in Hauser Auditorium. No matter that no student had ever before played it (it was the sole instrument of Juilliard-trained Music Department Chair Dr. Andrew Moore). One day he approached Dr. Moore with his curiosity, which was warmly accepted, and now, every Thursday, he receives a private lesson from the teacher.

“I definitely know I wouldn’t get to do these things in another school,” he says. The math-minded musician who is also an athlete—he plays lacrosse, basketball, water polo, and squash at school—says Pingry inspires him. “I’m surrounded by a lot of people like me, or much better than me, and that drives me to work hard, and have fun!”