The Pingry School

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.

Just one year in, Mr. Coakley has become Form I Team Leader, overseeing Form I programming and faculty. He is also a member of the Middle School Multicultural Team and teaches a section of Emotional Intelligence & Cultural Competency. 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.”

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.”

“I’ve been teaching for 40 years and I’ve never seen a Kindergartner tackle a 1,500-piece puzzle,” said Mrs. Previti. “They begged us to let them do puzzles instead of go out for Recess. They were like ants!” (As a point of comparison, she adds, 100- to 200-piece puzzles are more the norm for this age.) Every day after lunch, during activity time, the boys worked, calmly, cooperatively. First they sorted the pieces into containers by color, each student took a color, and they got to work assembling the borders. The brain-bending interior soon followed. At one point, without uttering a word, Colton and Max switched places so they could better access their parts of the puzzle. Pieces were readily exchanged, as needed. Arguments never broke out. When a comrade expressed interest in joining the group, he was quickly absorbed, and made a “puzzlemaster-in-training.”

A longtime puzzler herself, Mrs. Previti related easily to her students’ passion. When her grandson received a holographic puzzle as a gift and found it too challenging, she spent days staying up past midnight to finish it, and surprise him.

He wanted to wrap up a project on conflict dialogue that he was working on for Dana Sherman’s writing class (banter with his older brother Daniel ’22 provided ideal fodder). Then there was an expository essay on character traits that he was ready to dive into, also for Mrs. Sherman’s class. When those assignments were complete, he could settle in to Jon Krakauer’s 1997 bestseller Into Thin Air, the gripping account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster. He had begun the 400-page book three days earlier, and only 150 pages remained.

Thomas, who began Pingry last year as a fourth-grade student, has always enjoyed reading and writing. But, he admits, if it weren’t for Mrs. Sherman’s writing class—a new offering in the Lower School, and part of the students’ comprehensive language arts curriculum—he probably wouldn’t write on his own.

It also helps that Pingry teachers collaborate, with intention. So, when Dr. Pearlman began reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH with Thomas’s class and discussing the concept of character traits, Mrs. Sherman segued into a related creative writing assignment, asking Thomas and his classmates to describe, in detail, a character of their own imagining.

“Every year, with every teacher, my writing improves,” he remarks. “Every teacher is different, and I learn so much.”

The girl who never before thought of herself as a writer, suddenly did. “I felt the passion that Mrs. Singer had for English and it really inspired me,” she recalls. “She opened my eyes to writing, and now I’m gearing myself towards pursuing journalism. I completely flipped.”

Last summer she participated in the Pioneer Research Program, in which she was selected, along with two international students, to learn poetry through an online exchange with a professor from Washington & Lee University. At the end of it, she wrote a 20-page research paper linking Langston Hughes’s poetry with contemporary issues of racism. It—along with her own piece of poetry inspired from the class—earned her two regional writing awards. Her academic “flip,” it turns out, paid off.

What’s her favorite spot on Pingry’s campus? Mr. Keating’s “hallway desk,” which strategically positions him—front and center—among milling students. Yelena credits Mrs. Singer with opening her eyes to literature and writing, and English teacher Mr. Keating with helping her to find her voice. His hallway desk, and their regular exchanges, exemplify that discovery. “I can always stop by and talk to him, about everything and anything,” she says. “Pingry teachers really take the time to share their passions, and they make it hard not to feel inspired.”

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!”