The Pingry School

Dr. Mecartty, who spent her childhood in both Trinidad and Venezuela, came to the United States in 1984 to pursue a master's and doctorate degree. She has lived in the U.S., her adopted country, she says, for as long as she lived in her native country Venezuela. Prior to coming to Pingry, she was an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Spanish Teacher Education at The College of New Jersey for five years; college politics left her wanting. What's more, while she didn't mind the onus to publish, it wasn't her passion. "I love to teach, and I love to teach teachers how to impart knowledge to students," she says. Considering a transition to high school education, she came to Pingry to teach a demo class of Spanish 3. Impressed to find energized, attentive, and interactive students, she never looked back. 

"I have a lot of flexibility in course design, and I'm able to apply my training in second language acquisition to the courses I teach here. My colleagues and I are very much open to injecting new ideas into the curriculum," she says. "And Pingry has allowed me to do professional training workshops with other faculty on various aspects of teaching, learning, and diversity and inclusion. My ongoing goals are to be an impactful, engaging, teacher and a lifelong learner. Professional development at Pingry allows me to grow in these areas. It's a tremendous blessing."

Which is why, when he was hoping to redevelop the fourth-grade language arts curriculum to explore a more diverse canon, he was met with complete support by Lower School faculty and administrators alike. Among the many books students delve into now, two works of long-form poetry about a Sudanese girl who is struggling to gain literacy; and another, complementing it, about a young boy—an immigrant from Darfur—and his acclimation to life in Minnesota.  

"Curriculum should be a living organism, it shouldn't be set," he says. "It needs to live and change as the time changes, and as kids need exposure to different things. It's great that we're having these conversations at Pingry and that we're given the flexibility to make these changes." 

Make no mistake, with a background in theater—outside of school, he still works in community theater—Mr. Kellner is not all serious. He enjoys "doing the voices" when he reads to his classes, assuming the characters and bringing them to life. In particular, his students were hysterical over his rendition of The Secrets of Ms. Snickle's Class, in which her classroom transforms into her home, and her desk into a cat. "I think of every day as a performance," he says. "My students are my captive audience."

First, there was the influence of her mother, a lifelong elementary school educator. Then, there was her natural love for teaching. Dr. D’Ausilio had always enjoyed the instructional requirements of her graduate and postdoctoral work, but knew she didn’t want to run a lab, so university teaching out. Finally, at a hiring conference in Boston in 2012, Pingry presented her with a singular opportunity: design a class, however you wish, that introduces students to the process of scientific research.

“I didn’t even realize such a class was possible in a high school. I interviewed at other schools and they didn’t have anything like this, or the resources to support it,” she says. “With Introduction to Scientific Research, I have the freedom to teach whatever and however I want. I feel like I get to teach kids everything I wish I had learned before grad school.”

And so she does. Far from a traditional exam-based course, the class is open-ended, by her design, so students are forced to figure out a lot on their own. At the start of the semester, she assigns them a pool of proteins, whose functions are all unknown, and asks them to work together to identify what they do. “This is novel research,” she explains. “My students really learn that science is a process and you fail a lot. The ability to be a good scientist is the ability to bounce back from your failures. That’s something many of my kids are exposed to for the first time in this class. They have to trouble shoot and repeat the experiment, that’s not typically something you see in a high 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!”

Make no mistake, Ms. Mahida, who also teaches Grade 9 English, still cherishes her time in the classroom. During her first year with freshmen, she recalls feeling thrilled by how much they grew between September and June. “When I read their final exams I got emotional thinking of who they had become at the end of year,” she recalls. “Holy cow! In two hours you just wrote an essay on Othello that we only took three weeks to cover. I was so proud of them.”

English is a second language for Ms. Mahida’s Korean mother, and, having grown up in rural Oklahoma, her father didn’t finish college. During a childhood spent in South Carolina, she witnessed them struggle to fully express themselves. Now, she harnesses the memory so that her own “kids” won’t have to struggle with self-expression. “I really love being an English teacher because being able to write and express yourself gives you freedom that you wouldn’t otherwise have,” she says. “I want my students to feel free. Effective self-expression is a tool they can use to advance whatever cause they choose to be a part of."

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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 then-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.

What does he enjoy most about being a Pingry teacher and dean?

“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.”

Meet More Pingry Scholars

The summer before he began at the Lower School he thought hard about his lesson plans and the curriculum, unsure of the ground he would be able to cover. But the moment he arrived it became clear to him that he would be able to do a lot; the possibilities excited him. “The focus on creative education and the student dedication here are to a level I hadn’t seen before.” What’s more, he says, relationship building—among teachers, students, administrators, and parents—is a priority. “Pingry gives me the freedom, support, and ability to explore my creativity as a teacher. I’m excited by the lessons I teach, and my energy is visible to the kids.”

His lessons of experiential learning are cases in point. One spring day, for their unit on Ellis Island, he asked students to arrive at school wearing the clothes of the country they’re “immigrating” from, and carrying an old pillowcase or suitcase filled with only essential belongings. As immigrants aboard a “ship” (Pingry’s outdoor loading dock), they were simulating the Atlantic crossing to New York. “Half an hour into the ‘ride’ there are always one or two kids who come up to me and ask, ‘Are we there yet?’’’ Mr. Haber recalls, chuckling. “’No,’” I answer. “’It’s another two weeks, actually.’ We had been discussing this period of history for several weeks, but it always amazes me that sitting on a piece of concrete for two hours can teach kids so much more than simply sitting in the classroom.”

Whether it’s teaching the immigrant story in this way, taking to the woods of the Lower School, charging his class with a shelter-building exercise for their Lenape Indian unit, or asking them to don wigs and role-play Revolutionary War-era debates in Independence Hall, at Pingry, Mr. Haber is the designer of his class’s best lessons.