Exeter Teachers Discuss Work, Family Balance

Math Instructor Panama Geer wakes up at 5 AM on Monday mornings to the cries of her eighteen-month and three-year-old daughters sounding through the halls of her faculty residence in Dunbar Hall. She brews a cup of coffee and looks over her grading of a student’s quiz. A struggling student knocks on her apartment door at 7:30 AM, seeking help reviewing solutions before class. After helping her pupil, Geer steps away for a few moments to shoo her kids off to school before rushing to her classroom for an 8 AM math class, the first of four classes she will teach that day. She looks pensive as her students struggle through complicated math concepts, but she brightens whenever someone makes a breakthrough. She has an advisee meeting during lunch, followed by quick conversations with fellow colleagues and committee members. Next, she teaches Drama Sports. At the end of the school day, Geer picks up her children from daycare before making dinner for the family. On her duty nights in Dunbar, students from her classes pile onto the couches in the lounge outside her apartment, furiously correcting a recent test. For hours, she jumps between answering calculus questions, checking in Dunbar residents and putting her kids to bed before finally retiring past 11 PM for the night.

“I don’t take it for granted for a second, how good the lifestyle is, and how much we have at our disposal.”

217 faculty members live across the Exeter campus. Their roles span from athletic coach to math instructor, art teacher to student advisor, dorm head to dance instructor. While teaching multiple classes a day, faculty are obliged not just to instruct, but also to take part in numerous other activities, such as dorm duty, advising and committees.

Exeter’s faculty are compensated for their hard work in a number of ways. The school covers the full cost of tuition for faculty children who attend Exeter and pays the equivalent of a day student’s tuition for faculty children who wish to attend other schools. “I don’t take it for granted for a second, how good the lifestyle is, and how much we have at our disposal,” Geer said. “It’s a huge benefit for families. While raising a family is really challenging, there are also amazing benefits that the school tries to put in to help.” Faculty members also have access to campus athletic facilities and receive mortgage subsidies. These benefits do, however, come along with a host of additional duties.

Many teachers advise clubs on campus, coach sports, live in student dorms and serve on various committees. Without faculty fulfilling these duties, of course, many opportunities for students would not exist. “I think that anyone who took a job here, that was made abundantly clear when they applied that it’s not just a teaching job, that we all knew what we were getting into,” Geer said. “Classically, there’s the model of the triple threat. The triple threat is teaching, athletics and dorm.”

Faculty members who have decided to raise families on campus are even busier. “I love the community, and I love having other faculty kids kicking around and a campus full of students,” Math Instructor Gwynneth Coogan said. “I value the diverse student body, and what a good example that is for my kids. The downside to living on campus, is only those times you have to be the mean parent in public.” Parental duties are often put on public display because of the nature of a boarding school campus. Geer agreed, saying, “There are times where you have to discipline your kids, and you have to do it in front of the people that you work with, and your students. Which isn’t the case in most jobs. It’s not that you can’t separate it, it’s just that it’s much more intertwined than in other places.”

History Instructor Kent McConnell, who has worked here for nine years, also commented on the unique challenges of raising kids at Exeter. “While PEA is a wonderful place to raise young children given their exposure to the students, faculty and opportunities on campus, there is ultimately a price to be paid when it comes to normalized family patterns,” he said. “Finding time to be ‘a family’ is much more difficult as opposed to teaching at a school where your home life is separate from work, both physically and mentally,” McConnell said.

Many other faculty could relate to McConnell’s perspective. Biology Instructor Richard Aaronian felt that sometimes he was pulled between his students and his children. “I raised two boys here, and it was great,” he said. “There was a flipside to that too, because at bedtime you hear a knock on your door when you’re trying to put your kids to bed. I always would ask the students, would it wait, and I could tell if it really couldn’t. So I tried not to let it take me away from my family, but it did sometimes.”

In addition to advising a number of clubs, serving on committees and coaching two terms of introductory fitness, McConnell also finds time to conduct academic research. “Research, whatever type it is in my field, feeds my knowledge base that only makes me a more knowledgeable and effective teacher in the classroom,” he said. “Too much of the time these entities are talked about here as discrete topics when in actuality they can be quite complimentary.” He added that writing his own papers and books helps him understand some of the struggles his students face.

McConnell also reflected on the “triple threat” mentality, saying that the Academy makes the responsibilities that come with being a teacher here clear during the application process. “But in my opinion this ‘threat’ never seems to go away as it moves from an issue of job security to an issue of sanity and lifestyle,” he said. Despite these challenges, McConnell described what drew him to Exeter, saying, “I came to Exeter because I was impressed by its graduates (many of whom I encountered in graduate school), the pedagogy of the school, current students and its location… I love the cold and snow!”

In spite of the Academy’s demands on faculty members’ time, all teachers are united by the experience of educating Exeter students. Aaronian, Exeter’s current longest tenure faculty member—he has taught at Exeter for 47 years—believes that teaching and bonding with a small group of passionate students is worth every sacrifice. “It doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some times of stress, and wondering how I’m going to get everything done, but there aren’t too many teachers who have 12 to 14 really good kids in class,” he said. “And you get to face that every day. We all work really hard, and students do as well... this is a wonderful place to be.”