Campus Voices

Lower School

Jessica Evans

When I first found my way to my new classroom in August, I was struck by the twists and turns, and the nooks and crannies, that give the Markham Building its decidedly unclassroom-like personality. The math classroom in the back of the second floor feels more like a converted apartment than the industrial concrete or brick schoolrooms in which I spent many of my years teaching. How appropriate, I thought, the math department lives above the art department. More

Middle School

Ethan Rossiter

In the first few weeks of the school year, I did a lesson with my seventh graders on the use of vivid language. I asked them, “How do you bring characters alive? A scene? A moment?” For the writing exercise, I wrote a terrible little story called “Tom’s Tuna Fish.” It was about a man named Tom who ate the same tuna fish sandwich from his corner deli every Saturday afternoon. More

Upper School

Sarabinh Levy-Brightman

“Hinduism: It’s better than Harry Potter!” exclaimed one of my world religion students during a mind-bending conversation about Krishna’s theophany in the eleventh teaching of the Bhagavadgita. At that moment I sat back and smiled. It wasn’t simply the catchy phrase that made me smile (though it was catchy indeed); rather, it was the fact that my students were taking this strange world into themselves and making sense of it.

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All School

Charlie Ruopp

As some of you may know, before assuming the position as Assistant Head of School for Academic Affairs this academic year, I spent most of my professional career in public education. (I did spend my high school years, however, at Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school outside of Philadelphia.) I taught Biology and Anatomy and Physiology for more than a decade before becoming a middle school and then high school principal. More