JTerm at The Episcopal Academy

The Episcopal Academy

TWO WEEKS 30+ COURSE OFFERINGS TRANSFORMATIVE, INNOVATIVE, AND INSPIRING

Check Out Our JTerm Video Scan the QR code at left or visit

vimeo.com/123508427 to hear students, teachers, and parents describe the magic of JTerm.

Instead of having six or seven different courses each day in blocks of 45 minutes, imagine having one course, all day long, for two straight weeks. This is the student experience in JTerm at The Episcopal Academy.

For our teachers, the change is also dramatic. Instead of planning carefully to ensure every minute of the 45-minute block is engaging, the teacher now has to plan a series of activities that last for seven hours.

My most recent JTerm students conducted a focus group with some EA parents to discover what they hoped their children would gain from an EA education. Common themes emerged quickly, and the students generated a powerful list that included: academic rigor, real-life application, strong relationships with teachers, fostering a global perspective, and deep engagement. Through the dedication and creativity of our faculty, alumni, and parents, JTerm has truly met all of these criteria.

Our teachers create learning environments that motivate students to want to learn for the sake of learning, without the external motivator of traditional grades. The extra time gives classes the freedom to travel and to invite multiple experts and thought leaders to participate. Without the burden of the core curriculum, teachers are free to explore interdisciplinary topics, and because teachers are usually paired, they learn new techniques, approaches, and styles. Because there are students mixed together from ninth to twelfth grade, teachers must differentiate the instruction to engage differences in interest, academic ability, and intellectual maturity.

All of these factors create a fascinating sandbox for teachers to play in and experiment with new ideas. There is so much to learn. What truly motivates students to learn? What kinds of assessments are engaging and applicable to the real world? How does my relationship with the student change when we spend all day together for two straight weeks? Our Upper School faculty members work hard to create fascinating courses and adapt their pedagogy to take advantage of these changes, which are simultaneously freeing and daunting. There is no doubt that teaching a JTerm class well is challenging, exhausting, and exhilarating.

After conducting their focus group, my students were tasked with visiting three dozen courses and documenting how the JTerm experience was helping to meet our parents’ wish list. The students quickly uncovered countless examples and stories that were sure to inspire our entire EA community. As one of my students concluded after witnessing the magic every day for two weeks, “I knew there was good stuff going on, but I had no idea JTerm was this good.”

As I walk around each January and see the rigorous, dynamic, and engaging learning taking place in our classrooms, I am excited by the opportunities that JTerm creates for us. Through alternative approaches, like this, that are interwoven with a strong, liberal arts education, our students are inspired with new topics, in-depth projects, and transformative relationships.

We hope this publication and our video give you a sense of the magic happening here at EA. On behalf of the EA community, I thank the faculty, staff, parents, and alumni, who help make this profound student experience possible each year.

T.J. Locke, Ed.D. The Greville Haslam Head of School •1

JTerm at The Episcopal Academy: Why Here?

Why Now?

By Catherine J. Hall, Ph.D. Assistant Head of School

The Episcopal Academy’s rich tradition of academic excellence is firmly rooted in the core tenets of educational best practices. Our faculty is superior, our program is diverse and deep, and our students are incredibly talented. Why would we consider making any changes to a program that is already thriving? The answer is because we saw an opportunity to do things differently in a way that could catalyze a new level of academic excellence, one that will lead Episcopal forward in exciting ways.

The 2010 Strategic Plan challenged The Episcopal Academy to push on the boundaries of teaching and learning. We were asked to look beyond our campus to explore how new teaching practices, technologies, and experiences could affect our program. This challenge was inspiring, and it gave us a chance to bring our faculty and academic leaders together to brainstorm, think big, and interrogate how Episcopal’s program should evolve. Mindful of wanting to preserve the best of who and what we are as a school, we also wanted to find new ways to invigorate the program and to amplify what we do best as educators.

JTerm emerged from this discussion, a concept anchored in some very simple ideas to enable teachers and students to pursue areas of passion, to think deeply and critically, and to tap into the best resources available to create an incredibly unique learning experience. JTerm is a two-week program in the Upper School, situated between the first and second semesters. Students come back from winter break and jump into their chosen JTerm course, which they take for the entire two weeks during the regular school day hours. These courses are typically team-taught by teachers from different academic departments. Teacherstudent ratios are very low, averaging 1:8, providing students with an opportunity to create relationships with faculty that are deep and lasting.

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JTerm courses are created entirely by the teachers leading them. The simple concept was to see what could happen when you allow teachers to create a course with a colleague that enables them to teach something about which they are deeply passionate. The courses would be rigorous, interdisciplinary, intense explorations of ideas, content, and skills. How would that approach change the content taught, the delivery of instruction, and the experience of students? What we found did not surprise us.

Teachers are newly inspired to dive into their JTerm courses, and students feed off that energy and excitement in palpable ways. The learning opportunities that result are fantastic.

JTerm classes provide our faculty with a chance to think differently about time and space. While typical classes leave teachers with short periods of time each day to move through a course, JTerm provides a completely different canvas for teachers to explore the learning process.

Without the trappings of class bells ringing, teachers can hone in on learning goals and structure a process that heightens learning in transformative ways.

JTerm classes are also able to capitalize on the amazing resources available, not only on our campus, but in our area, across the country, and around the world. Most JTerm classes are based on campus, but teachers embed exploratory trips into the program, both in our local area and as day trips to cities around Philadelphia. We are able to extend our classroom well beyond the walls of Episcopal, tapping into the best learning opportunities available. Several international trips also run during JTerm, enabling our students to dive deeply into an academic experience in a very different environment.

For our faculty, JTerm has brought forward a myriad of opportunities to learn, grow, and be inspired. Teaching in an area of passion is certainly part of that growth. JTerm has also provided a completely different way of looking at collaborative teaching. Faculty from different areas of the school and with very different backgrounds and styles can come together to provide an incredibly unique educational experience for students. This rare opportunity to share ideas, see new teaching styles, and find new ways to structure learning has proven to be invaluable in our conversations around faculty growth. •4

The inherently interdisciplinary nature of JTerm has provided us with an opportunity to see new connections across our program. Through JTerm, our students are able to focus on skills in a way that brings the best of our program together in a single experience. By taking down the walls between departments and fostering these exciting partnerships across disciplines, we are able to think differently about the kind of learning experiences our students can have. For students, it affords them the chance to make meaningful connections across content areas, a critical skill set they will draw upon in college and in life.

An unexpected benefit of JTerm has been the ways in which it has pulled our community together and provided us with a shared opportunity to learn. While Upper School students are the official participants in JTerm classes, students throughout Lower and Middle School experience JTerm as well. Through class partnerships and connections, JTerm is buzzing across campus during these two weeks. Faculty in Lower and Middle School, inspired themselves by what they see with JTerm, are finding exciting ways to adapt the best parts of JTerm for their students and classes.

JTerm did not emerge overnight at Episcopal. Three years in the making, JTerm grew from the ambitious ideas put forward in our Strategic Plan. Thoughtfully shaped over time to best align with Episcopal’s goals and vision, JTerm is a program that not only highlights some of the best aspects of teaching and learning at Episcopal, but it pushes us to go further. This platform from which we can now look forward is an exciting one, one that will enable our program to not only remain exceptional but to grow in new and exciting ways.

JTerm is, without question, the best teaching and learning I have witnessed in my career. The talent of our faculty is inspiring, the learning opportunities are deep, meaningful, and transformative, and the possibilities that emerge from this unique and dynamic program are endless.

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C R ACKI NG TH E C ODE Codes are an essential part of everyday life—affecting the language we speak, the DNA that defines us, the music we listen to, and the safety of our banking transactions.

genome, music, and lie detection. For instance, the students learned the math behind encoding, used bvjk for internet security of credit card transactions or banking online.

In the Secret Messages, Hidden Codes JTerm class, co-teachers Tom Goebeler, Helena Cochrane, and Ashley O’Connor led Episcopal students on a fascinating, two-week examination of codes. The course challenges students to learn, create, and decipher codes.

Through a foundation in mathematics, students gain a new appreciation for the codes that are interwoven in our everyday lives.

The students even took to the Clark Campus Green one day to explore flag semaphore, a telegraphy system that communicates messages over distances through the use of flags and hand signals. Split into two groups, students stood at each side of the Campus Green and sent coded messages to each other with the help of Cochrane, Goebeler, and O’Connor.

The idea for this JTerm course came from earlier in Goebeler’s career when he taught abstract algebra at Ursinus College. In that college course, he included practical applications of the material taught in the class, and cryptography was a particular favorite of the Ursinus students.

“It never left me that students were excited by that particular topic,” Goebeler recalls. “After a lot of careful consideration, I was able to put together the essentials of the topic that would be suitable for high schoolers.

Ten seven-hour days (in JTerm) gave us the chance to survey the topic at great depth.”

The main focus in week one was cryptography, but the class also tackled signals (morse code, sign language, semaphore, etc.), linguistics, and author verification.

The second week featured other topics like the human

Since learning outside of Episcopal’s walls is an important part of JTerm, the class took a series of two interesting trips—first heading to the National Security Agency (NSA) and its National Cryptologic Museum (NCM) located in Annapolis Junction, Md., as well as a separate day of Philadelphia trips to visit the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Penn Libraries.

“Some of the students were just as amazed as I was at the tactile experiences we had. We were lucky enough to actually touch some real treasures. We operated a working Enigma machine, housed at the Cryptologic Museum. We were permitted to page through a book owned and annotated by Isaac Newton, with our bare fingers!” says Goebeler. “Besides this, we think that students developed better pattern recognition skills, gained an appreciation of some of the historical implications of codes, and earned a view of themselves as a team of able problem solvers.” —Bill Doherty

By Sarah Baker ’01

Irrespective of discipline or grade level, committed educators share the common goal of bringing their material alive for their students, of shrinking the space that separates students from an authentic and engaged experience of content. The most effective and inspiring teachers continually think about and work ever toward new methods of making content and knowledge tangible, relatable, and relevant. These teachers endeavor to equip students with the competencies and the desire to walk confidently toward any learning challenge. With unflagging effort, the appropriate resources, and more than a little inspiration, Episcopal teachers achieve this end every day within the four walls of their classroom spaces. But during JTerm, when those four walls of the classroom drop away, so too fall many of the most intractable and unyielding barriers that often stand between students and the knowledge and skills they both need and seek.

Head of Upper School Delvin Dinkins refers to “pushing back the frontiers of traditional learning” when he considers the effect of space and place on the JTerm student and faculty experience. So many of the new frontiers that opened to the students in the 32 JTerm course offerings during the 2015 session brought those learners within grasping distance of true and textured understanding. English teacher Lee Billmyer calls this effect “something you just can’t get from a textbook.” Lee co-taught the course City of Brotherly Love During the Revolutionary War with her colleague in history Rob Trumbull. Together, Billmyer and Trumbull took their students across the region to walk onto battlefields and into the footsteps of Revolutionary War heroes, down cobblestones the Founding Fathers trod, and into rare archives where political cartoons told the social and popular back story of the time. Trumbull

“We learn things, and the kids learn things, and we are all investigating together.”

—Angela Miklavcic, Upper School Science Chair

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“JTerm is geared toward the inquisitive learner” in a way that is personalized, attached to emotion and experience, and gives kids the voice.”

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—Kim Piersall, Director of Experiential Learning

speaks to the impact of these trips on his students’ learning when he remarks that “being right on site, you can have the students visualize what it must really have been like, and you can point and tell them, ‘The British came up over that hill just right over there.’”

This redefinition of a primary source, this extraordinary power of presence and place, is one of the resources presented to teachers and students in JTerm that make the experience so transformative. It takes as many forms and plays as many roles as there are courses offered, and each instance of the phenomenon illustrates the dramatic change that can occur when students come face-to-face with knowledge in situ.

In much the same fashion as the students of City of Brotherly Love traveled to track down history, students of Sacred Spaces, co-taught by history teacher Rob Maier and religion teacher Topher Row, journeyed into the cities of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as to Episcopal’s old Merion campus and into our current Class of 1944 Chapel. Throughout their explorations, students sought inspiration for their final project, which focused on designing and building a scale model of a memorial chapel and repository of institutional memory for Episcopal.

The impact of this sort of 3-D, interactive learning is not limited to courses that explore historical or architectural themes. In Making the Magic Happen: Physics in Theater, co-taught by theatrical design teacher Kelly Bertucci and physics teacher Steve Kerwin, students utilized the scene shop and theater spaces on campus, inviting into these spaces experts in theatrical rigging who delighted the students by flying them around above the stages. Later in the two-week session, the students studied acoustics in our Class of 1944 Chapel with the help of student organist Will Patterson ’16. Finally, they journeyed to the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts to learn how to perform various theatrical circus maneuvers, such as climbing onto a static trapeze, ascending and spinning around on silks suspended from the ceiling, and jumping and flipping through hoops. Kerwin calls this experience “immersive” in every sense.

In a similarly hybrid use of campus and community spaces, students of Kitchen Chemistry, co-taught by Science Chair Angela Miklavcic and chemistry teacher Christy Rheam, transformed a physics lab into a multi-station kitchen space worthy of Top Chef, returning to that home

A WIN-WIN SITUATION When he began his last JTerm experience, Chris Redden ’15 had less than six months left in his Episcopal Academy career.

For Redden, one of the leaders in his graduating class, the Financial Literacy class he chose for his final JTerm ended up being a win-win situation—further confirming that his decision to major in finance at Lehigh University was the right one while providing him with an unforgettable learning experience.

“Getting to visit places like Goldman Sachs and Turner Investments and hearing from Mr. (Francis) Kinniry (a current Episcopal parent who is a principal in the Vanguard Investment Strategy Group) allowed me to see former Episcopal Academy students doing exactly what I want to do later in my life,” says Redden. “It made me really excited about what comes next in life.”

In addition to learning about high finance through lectures and a series of class trips, Redden and the members of the Financial Literacy class, co-taught by Wei Yang and Andy Hess, also learned how to manage their own personal finances.

Redden’s final JTerm project centered on budgeting, a real-life skill that will come in handy over the next four years in college in Bethlehem, Pa. and beyond.

“For my final JTerm project, I had to write out a full budget for living in Philadelphia after college on a limited income,” says Redden. “We had to balance not only paying off debts, but also remembering to save for our retirement. It was cool to see how saving a little bit over time can compound when given the chance to grow.” —Bill Doherty

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base between visits to local restaurants, cheese makers, and food innovators. Miklavcic remembers that this flexible use of space and time provided “the opportunity to talk about the science, do the piece of direct instruction, and also explore in ways we can’t in our traditional classrooms. So we learn things, and the kids learn things, and we are all investigating together.”

Far from the gates of campus, the students of Exploring Cape Town, South Africa through Service, co-taught and chaperoned by Spanish teacher Andrew Shimrock and Director of Community Outreach Susan Swanson, visited Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island and later dined with a South African activist who had been imprisoned in the same place. The students served the impoverished community where they were staying and where they had come to know—not just to meet—the people who call it home. Swanson remembers that “location played heavily into our service” and that the students were moved and changed by being embedded within a community, thereby gaining access to a kind of primary and immediate experience that is rarely possible in traditional service projects.

Similarly, students of Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas traveled to the archipelago itself to see what Darwin saw, an experience that Nicholas Kick ’16 explains made “the theory of evolution come to life” and that was attended by the power of an unanticipated observation and •12

realization, what Nicholas calls “the positive impact of [seeing] people molding their lives around an environment instead of vice versa.”

As Nicholas found, so many stories of travel and of novel experiences of space—near and far—are stories of surprise: unexpected lessons, serendipitous meetings, chance observations. And given the structure of JTerm, teachers find that there is time to let the surprises happen. Kim Piersall, the Director of Experiential Learning, talks about the atmosphere that this kind of single-mindedness and concentrated focus creates in terms that are reminiscent of meditation. Piersall believes that the absence of schedule-generated pressure means that learning becomes “organic, authentic, and centered.” The effect of this kind of “centering” is that the program revolves around the “inquisitive learner in a way that is personalized, attached to emotion and experience, and gives kids the voice.”

Piersall’s thoughts echo in the reflections of history teacher Anna McDermott who, along with her colleague in history Damon Kuzemka, taught Hollywood and History: Battles, Bios, Bogus?, a class that interrogated where movies and history intersect with, reinforce, or question each other. When McDermott reflects upon “space” and its effect on JTerm, she goes back again and again to the sense of space as a unit of time. She remembers, “The fact that we can stop and take more time on a subject with the students and sidetrack when they ask questions makes this experience special. The students were more curious than I have seen them in a regular classroom setting, even intrigued. That is inspirational as a teacher.”

Dinkins, the Head of Upper School, believes that this sort of student agency fosters “the courage to try out ideas without the cushion of the four walls and a ceiling in the classroom.” The construct of courage implies notions of risk; teachers widely report that their students experience some intellectual discomfort, scholarly anxiety, or at least wide-eyed awe when they first face down the challenge of directing their own learning in new and important ways. But the construct of courage also implies the notion of reward; teachers just as widely report that their students develop confidence quickly and take responsibility fully during the term.

Piersall credits this agility to the sheer fact that, during JTerm, “there is simply enough space, enough time, for the students to know that they will be able to figure it all out.”

JTerm ’15 Fact File

32 JTerm courses offered 102 JTerm field trips 4 International trips 34,000 miles traveled

“This experience made the theory of evolution come to life for me.”

—Nicholas Kick ’16

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The impact of JTerm and its innovative use of space and time extend far beyond the students enrolled in each class. At the core of JTerm is the value that the school places on interdisciplinary and inter-grade collaboration. The great majority of classes are co-taught by teachers from two different departments, and no class contains students from only one class year. And yet, the extent to which JTerm has fostered sharing, forged connections, and created relationships has outstripped even the ideal that its creators conceived. Because there is the time and the space, JTerm is an occasion on which the campus opens in ways it cannot usually. The most remarkable moments of JTerm happen when Upper School students share their ideas, their projects, and eventually their learning with students in the Lower and Middle schools.

While many of these interactions occur on the last day of JTerm when each class presents its final project or product, many happen less formally throughout the two weeks. Piersall remembers watching the students of the 2015 edition of the Apps Challenge class, which is co-taught by math teacher Kelly Edwards and computer science teacher Matt Memmo, when they traveled to the Lower School to poll the children about the attractiveness of their proposed new iPhone games and to seek advice about the proper design of a cartoon penguin. Miklavcic and Rheam also reflect fondly on their Upper School students’ interaction with Lower School students in Kitchen Chemistry. On one occasion, the Upper Schoolers in their course were charged with teaching the Lower Schoolers how to form lollipops from pulled sugar; on another, the older students taught the younger students a molecular gastronomy lesson on how to make “blueberry caviar” from the juice of the fruit. Miklavcic was particularly struck by how her students realized the challenge of teaching when attempting to convey knowledge to their younger peers. She recalls, “It was an unintended lesson, one I had the space to teach.”

And in a way, Miklavcic writes one chapter of the JTerm story with that phrase: unintended lessons and the space to teach them.

Sarah Baker ’01 is the Upper School English Department Chair at The Episcopal Academy •14

JTerm’s Collaborative Power What do you get when a theater teacher joins forces with a physics teacher?

A unique JTerm course like Making the Magic Happen: Physics in Theater. True to its mission of interdisciplinary study opportunities, JTerm offers a wealth of classes that blossom from the creativity and collaboration of teachers who hail from vastly different disciplines.

Kelly Leight-Bertucci readily admits she wasn’t a physics fan back in high school. But as a technical theater director at EA, she uses the laws of motion and other physics principles every single school day.

“You can’t get away from physics because it pretty much rules your life,” she says. Leight-Bertucci makes use of math and science when teaching students how to create props or build a set that transports an audience to an imaginary world.

“I really wanted our students to embrace the fact that in technical theater, it’s not just art,” she says. “It’s artful science. I wanted them to get excited about art and science and realize that they’re not mutually exclusive.”

Stephen Kerwin, a physics teacher with a penchant for performance, was the logical JTerm teaching partner to explain why things work the way they do.

“Rather than dive deep into the theories and mathematics, we showed them the physics in action, which made it clear to our students why it matters,” he says.

Throughout the course, student groups worked on “magical” props, the culminating project for the course. One group created the rose from Beauty and the Beast that sheds its petals one by one. Another tried to construct the barber chair from Sweeney Todd that rose up as the victim fell back.

Lily Zelov ’18, Kelly Flynn ’17, and Lindiwe Mayinja ’15 worked on Mary Poppins’ incredible, infinite travel bag, from which she pulls a floor lamp, hat rack, mirror and, oh yeah, plant. The three had created a collapsible five-foot lamp using bungee cord and PVC pipes.

Zelov says she liked meeting students involved in theater and Kerwin’s demonstrations of physics concepts. “I assumed we would be spending more time learning about physics and discussing the different aspects that go into creating a large, onstage production,” she says. “In reality, though, we spent the majority of our time in the shop, working on our projects, which have proved to be much more difficult and challenging than anyone in class had imagined.” —Lini S. Kadaba

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Day in the Life of JTerm What happens during a typical day of JTerm? Here is a list of just a few things our students accomplished in one JTerm day: n Finished props for theater special effects n Visited two family farms and one farm expo n Spoke with professional filmmakers and architects n Learned the proper ways to make, taste, and market coffee at La Colombe n Filmed original vignettes in front of a green screen n Developed custom mobile apps n Visited NBC Studios to learn about broadcasting n Prepared a typical Ukranian Easter feast n Visited Wall Street to learn about the finance industry n Rehearsed original, one-act plays in EA’s Main Stage Theater n Used chemistry to make homemade marshmallows, lollipops, and bananas flambé n Sketched at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Barnes Foundation n Crafted precise replicas of proposed sacred spaces on campus n Toured historic sites in Philadelphia —Bill Doherty

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ALUMS AND PARENTS INFUSE JTERM WITH INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

By Lini S. Kadaba

T

he team of JTerm students pitched its concept and business plan for an upscale Asian fusion restaurant with beer garden called Mala to three stone-faced judges who interjected with tough question after tough question.

One in particular, long-time Philadelphia-area restaurateur Martin Grims ’79, peppered the students with questions about their planned venture. “How big is the space? And, how many seats?” he

asked, followed by, “Why did you decide not to open for lunch? Why are you losing those customers?”

It was the final presentations of the two teams in the Coming to the Table: The Development of the Restaurant JTerm course, and Grims, an EA alumnus and parent, was hosting at his White Dog Café in Wayne, Pa. Like many JTerm courses, this one made ample use of the EA community and its rich reservoir of parents and alumni ready to

bring a taste of the real world into the classroom. Guest participants infused their specialized expertise into courses including Financial Literacy (which attracted a slew of alumni who work on Wall Street and locally, including Frank Leto ’77, head of Bryn Mawr Trust); Sacred Spaces: Designing Episcopal Academy’s Next Building (Samuel E. Olshin ’78 of Atkin Olshin Schade Architects); and Sixty Million Frenchmen Cannot Be Wrong: How to Import Their Culture and `Savoir-Faire? (current parents Véronique Vadot, John Brown, Peter Blommer, Anna Slack, and Chuck Chupein, as well as parents of alumni Susan Coote and Lori Kelly).

According to course teachers, the guests proved to be invaluable partners.

“Marty’s experience and success in this industry made him an unquestioned authority for the kids; if he said it, they believed

it,” said Sarah Baker ’01, the chair of the Upper School English Department.

Grims not only served as judge but also visited the classroom to help students better understand the industry. “It can be difficult to convince adolescents—so prone to questioning—that what we tell them about the ‘real world’ is actually out there waiting for them,” Baker said. “He motivated them to meet a very high standard.”

During the two weeks of JTerm, students created a business plan for a restaurant concept and pitched to Grims and co-teachers Baker and Kris Aldridge, an Upper School history teacher, in the hopes of securing (hypothetical) funds to make a go of it. The class also explored the development of the restaurant, historical and cultural industry trends, and how to write restaurant reviews.

What made the culminating project particularly realistic was

“The experience without the parents would have been completely different, as they brought the ‘experiential’ aspect of the project.”

—Marc Eripret, World Language Department Chair •19

“[His] experience and success in this industry made him an unquestioned authority for the kids; if he said it, they believed it.”

—Sarah Baker ’01, Upper School English Department Chair

the presence of Grims, who besides “Sam brought a depth of White Dog, owns several other architectural knowledge to the establishments and knows plenty class, sharing his insights on about wooing prospective investors. sacred spaces and the architectural In fact, he told the students that he design process with the students,” had done, more or less what they explained Maier. “His probing were doing, just the day before in questions and comments balanced front of bankers. respect for the process the students “This is the real world,” Grims had just completed with the desire said, adding that the hardball ques- to push their creative thinking to tioning was “traditionally what a new levels.” banker would do. I think it’s an Likewise, Marc Eripret, chair excellent exercise.” of the world languages departIn Sacred Spaces, students ment and an Upper School French were challenged to design a smaller teacher, found parent involvement chapel on campus, and Samuel “incommensurable” in Sixty Million E. Olshin ’78 proved an integral Frenchmen. Co-taught by French part of the course. He gave a tour teacher Christèle Furey, the course of Temple Adeth Israel, one of his asked students to find a French firm’s renovation projects; made a product to import to the U.S., or presentation of sacred spaces from vice versa. around the world; and served as “Parents were involved almost one of the judges of final projects, on a daily basis with our students,” which included scale models. The Eripret said. Many work in the course was co-taught by Rob business world. For instance, Peter Maier, an Upper School history Blommer, parent of two recent EA teacher, and Topher Row, an Upper alums (William ’12 and Madeline School religion teacher. ’14) and current EA student •20

Matthew Blommer ’16, is the president and chief operating officer of the Blommer Chocolate Company.

“I talked about our strategy to export products to China,” Blommer said. His company is developing a market for its bulk chocolate with the goal of ultimately building a plant there to satisfy demand. “The EA students were all very engaged and interested. It didn’t hurt to talk about chocolate.” Or to pass out free samples.

“It’s a great way for parents and alumni to connect to the school,” he added. “That was really fun for me.”

Other parent visitors included Anna Slack, a one-time private chef who spoke to students about the food industry and cultural and taste differences between countries, and John Brown Jr., president of Penn Warehousing and Distribution, who gave a tour of his import/export facilities.

“They managed to explain to the students how to build a business from scratch and how to make it, for some of them, world renowned,” Eripret said. “The experience without the parents would have been completely different, as they brought the ‘experiential’ aspect of the project.”

Back at the White Dog Café, the second team of students vied for funding for Ellada, a proposed Mediterranean restaurant that would use local, fresh ingredients.

As the presentation progressed, Woody Nimoityn ’15 asked for an investment of $2.5 million.

“Are you putting any collateral down?” Grims asked.

“No. But we could negotiate that,” Nimoityn said, without missing a beat.

Afterward, the senior from Bryn Mawr, who is headed to Tufts University in the fall, reflected that the experience was “a little nerve-wracking, to be honest.”

Still, Nimoityn said, “having an expert restaurateur question me about our restaurant idea was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… I learned a lot from his advice and questions, especially about how he thought and how serious each detail actually is.”

Newtown Square-based journalist Lini S. Kadaba is the parent of a 2014 EA graduate and a frequent contributor to Connections.

JTERM ’15 FACT FILE

22 parent participants in JTerm 26 alumni participants in JTerm 21 different industries represented

“JTerm is an incredibly unique experience, where students and teachers are engaged in powerful, inspiring work that embodies the best possibilities of teaching and learning.”

T. J. Locke, Ed.D. The Greville Haslam Head of School The Episcopal Academy 1785 Bishop White Drive Newtown Square, PA 19073-1300 www.episcopalacademy.org ADD R ES S S ERVI C E R EQU ES TED

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