Welcome to a new segment of The Flex: Faculty Spotlight! I will be interviewing members of our faculty here at Pingry. This interview series is meant to highlight some of our extraordinary faculty, the people behind the lectures, tests, and homework, by getting to know them further. Each interview begins with inquiring about the teacher’s childhood, how they began teaching, and how they arrived at Pingry; then they are asked a few fun quick response questions which will be standard for each teacher. This first edition features Dr. Alexandra Lasevich, head of the math department, who has taught at Pingry for five years.

Dr. Lasevich’s entire childhood was spent in the Soviet Union, where she describes her life there as “very gray.” She describes her experiences under the control of Soviet propaganda; she had “no access to information about the outside world” and she “didn’t know that life could be any different.” Even her schooling was all under Soviet control. She had no control over which classes she took, and all extracurricular activities were dedicated to communist propaganda.

Dr. Lasevich’s high school experience was very unconventional. In just the sixth grade, she was already very advanced in mathematics, even compared to the other students in her “gifted” school. However, people of this level of intelligence were not perceived well by the Soviet government, and at “the ripe old age of eleven was declared to be the enemy of the people.” She eventually had to switch schools in eighth grade due to this unfavorability that the school now had against her. In her new school, however, Dr. Lasevich was taught by her favorite teacher, a math teacher, who sometimes even let her teach classes, although she had no plan to become a teacher at the time, but instead an engineer.

When she was sixteen years old, Dr. Lasevich graduated from high school and applied to college. In the Soviet Union, college was no cost to the students; however, only two percent of the entire population actually got accepted. Remarkably, Dr. Lasevich was part of this two percent, and she attended one year of university before she received a special opportunity to leave the Soviet Union in 1987. As a Jewish person, she was able to apply to go to Israel. However, because of the lack of a Soviet-Israeli diplomatic relationship, Soviet Jewish people attempting to travel to Israel needed to go through a “third country;” in this case, it was Austria.

However, instead of traveling from Austria to Israel, by the decision of her parents, Dr. Lasevich was able to ask for American asylum. Due to special circumstances in which Ellis Island (one of the United States’ immigration centers) was closed, she had to undergo the immigration process in Rome, Italy, where she lived for several months. At just eighteen years old, Dr. Lasevich entered the United States with refugee status and the citizenship of no nation.

Upon entering the United States, Dr. Lasevich’s family started with very little, and she had to work in factories for a while before she could ever attend college. After a couple of years, her mom found a good job, allowing Dr. Lasevich to quit the factory and study in college. Although her English was “virtually nonexistent,” her real strength was math. She was eventually noticed for her talent and began to get paid for tutoring students, and the tutor who hired Dr. Lasevich praised her for having a “gift of explaining things” and suggested that she become a teacher. Although rejecting this idea at first, she soon switched her major from Engineering to Theoretical Mathematics, got her education certification, and decided to become a teacher.

Dr. Lasevich began her teaching career in a small school in Elizabeth, NJ, which has since closed, called Benedictine Academy. Since then, before teaching Pingry, she taught for seven years at Kent Place School and fourteen years at Princeton Day School. Then in 2019, Dr. Lasevich took the opportunity to chair the math department at Pingry and has been teaching here since.

When Dr. Lasevich visited Pingry for the first time as a teacher from another school, she says that she felt the “respect that the students gave to [teachers] and to each other,” and that this attracted her to the school. She also likes that Pingry has “continued to stay ahead of a lot of advancements in technology.”

Quick-response round:

 

Q: As someone who has lived in New Jersey for a long time: Bon Jovi or Bruce Springsteen?

A: Bruce Springsteen

 

Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

A: Machu Picchu

 

Q: Jets or Giants (or other favorite team)? 

A:  Not a big football fan; favorite team because of their logo is the Pittsburgh Steelers

 

Q: Yankees or Mets (or other favorite team)?

A: Yankees

 

Q: Favorite food?

A: Japanese food and Middle-Eastern food

 

Overall, Dr. Lasevich’s favorite parts of Pingry are the “fun” parts, one specific example being the Halloween costume contests. She likes when “we come together as a community to have fun.” She also loves teaching her classes and loves when her students are equally as enthusiastic about learning.

 

 

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To contact the author: Jack Tedesco '26