Spotlight: Decades of Dedication for Faculty Retirees

Recognizing the Contributions of Retiring Faculty Members

Four faculty members announced their retirements at the end of the 2019-20 academic year. Here, we celebrate the dedication of humanities teachers Anny Jones and Jill Blackmer, Japanese teacher Masa Shimano, and robotics and science teacher Terry Wardrop ’73. Together, they have combined for 110 years of service to generations of St. Paul’s School students. These four individuals have held dozens of positions between them, from teaching to coaching to bringing distinguished visitors to the School to share their talents with the community to blazing new trails in engineering and sharing a foreign language and culture with students. Each has brought his or her own style and contributions to the School for many years and all will be missed, both for their service and for their daily presence. 

Jill Blackmer
Humanities

Retiring humanities teacher Jill Blackmer enjoyed a fulfilling career and will miss the magic of the classroom.

Ashley Festa

Looking back on her 10 years of teaching humanities at St. Paul’s School, Jill Blackmer says without question that her greatest accomplishment was influencing students’ lives. “There’s so much possibility with young people,” she says. “Being able to be a positive, constructive, helpful adult in a young person’s life, I’m proud of that.”

After practicing law for 25 years at Orr & Reno in Concord, Blackmer found herself missing the company of teenagers as her own five children began leaving the nest. The feeling was so strong that she left a fulfilling career to become a teacher, first at Bedford High School, then at St. Paul’s, where two of her children had attended high school. The job was just as fulfilling as she anticipated. Among her many classes, Blackmer taught Humanities V, which she especially loved because it was a full-year course and allowed her to get to know the students at a deeper level.

“The chemistry, the mystery that happens over the course of the year with the same kids is like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “It’s marvelous to see their improvement and their growing self-confidence.” Known as a demanding teacher, Blackmer wasn’t afraid to push students’ limits, because she knew they were capable of meeting her high expectations. “They have a tremendous capacity to expand, but they don’t know that yet.”

Her favorite courses to teach were the political science electives she developed herself, as well as a Political Philosophy class that inspired discussions centered around con- temporary applications – whether that be the COVID-19 lockdown, the Black Lives Matter movement, or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Jack Light ’20 took many of Blackmer’s classes, including Humanities V, American Government, and Political Philosophy, and says he appreciated her high standards.

“Ms. Blackmer required that we not only absorb the information, but also that we develop the skill necessary to evaluate and use new information to search for answers to difficult questions,” says Light. “This is a precious skill.” A former Nordic ski racer at Dartmouth College, Blackmer also enjoyed coaching club Nordic at St. Paul’s, which was another aspect of helping students grow up.

“She’s incredibly nurturing and understands how to help people develop their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses,” says Alexandra Vitkin ’20. Blackmer says – with just a tiny whisper of regret in her voice – she is eager to move into the next stage of her life. Along with hiking, biking, gardening and (eventually) traveling, she also has some research projects in mind to keep her busy, as well as refreshing her German and volunteering for the Biden/Harris ticket. While she’s looking forward to the luxury of setting her own schedule, Blackmer says her experience at St. Paul’s is irreplaceable. She’ll miss the meaningful relationships with her students and the support of her faculty colleagues. “I won’t miss grading papers that much,” she jokes, “but I will miss those wonderful relationships and the magical things that happen in the classroom.”

Masa Shimano
Languages

Masatoshi “Masa” Shimano began teaching at SPS with the goal of being an “authentic transmitter of Japanese culture and values in the United States.”

Jana F. Brown

Masa Shimano did not consider staying in the U.S. after moving temporarily to Arizona in 1980 to immerse himself in American culture – a move he made to better serve his Japanese students. It’s ironic, then, that the Tokyo-born teacher, who had never left Japan prior to that voyage, spent the next four decades in the U.S., educating students in his native language. Shimano’s initial plan after graduating in 1980 from Japan’s Sophia University with a degree in English language and studies was to teach English to Japanese students.

“After being in the States for a while,” explains Shimano. “I figured teaching my native language to non-native speakers sounded more intriguing than teaching English as a second language to students in Japan.” Shimano was drawn to St. Paul’s by the opportunity to teach Japanese as a second language at the secondary school level. St. Paul’s was one of few high schools at the time offering the complex language to its students. When Shimano joined the SPS faculty in 1984, he did so as only the second to teach in the three-year-old Japanese program. “I felt at home because of the distinctive four seasons, which were much closer to Japan than Arizona,” Shimano recalls of his decision to relocate to New Hampshire.

There were six years between Shimano’s arrival in America and his first return to Japan to see his family. He shared in a post-visit report that he made the most of his summer 1986 stay. In addition to joyfully reconnecting with family and friends, he shipped back from Japan seven boxes of books, films, art objects, toys, and other items that he planned to use in his SPS classroom. “To be an authentic transmitter of Japan- ese culture and values in the United States,” he wrote at the time, “I wanted to restore my ‘Japanese connection’ as much as I could and gather information helpful to my teaching at SPS.”

In his 36-year career at St. Paul’s, Shimano taught all levels of Japanese. When he started teaching in the early 1980s, Japanese was not yet well established as a high school subject in most areas of the U.S. “Bringing greater legitimacy and credibility to it soon became a pressing need for many of the teachers,” Shimano recalls, “as its popularity had started growing rapidly due to Japan’s economic expansion and the emerging interest in Japanese culture, society, and technology among Americans.”

Enrollment in the SPS Japanese program reflected the trend, one that remained relatively stable until the mid-90s. At times, Shimano taught as many as six classes in order to accommodate everyone during that stretch. Also during that period, he took on a national leadership role for the teaching of Japanese with his work on the Kisetsu Textbooks, dedicated to creating comprehensive teaching materials in Japanese for secondary schools. Working in conjunction with three others, it took five years to complete the first text – Kisetsu 1, which was adopted by 40 American schools in 2000. Shimano also co-authored Kisetsu 2 (2011). He considers the publication of the first volume a high point of his career, and his retirement plans include working with his co-author on the next installment in the series. “Although I still had a long way to go to become a master educator,” Shimano says of the publication of the first textbook, “it had brought a greater consistency and direction to my teaching.”

Shimano is also proud that he was able to facilitate making SPS one of the host sites of the Japan-America Grassroots Summit in 2004. The Summit is one of the largest annual gatherings between Japanese and Americans and takes place alternately in both countries with a regional theme. The SPS event featured keynote speaker Minoru “Ben” Makihara ’50. Among his other professional distinctions is a stint as director of the Northeast Council of Teachers of Japanese; outstanding teacher awards from Tufts University and the University of Chicago; and serving on the board of directors for Movement for Language and Culture. In addition to his years teaching SPS students, for many summers, Shimano taught Japanese Language and Culture to New Hamp- shire high school rising seniors at the SPS Advanced Studies Program. In the classroom, he adopted a simple philosophy of initiating for his students a lifelong journey of learning. He was known for his engaging and creative style in class, his accessibility to students, and his collegiality with SPS colleagues.

“My students and colleagues were a vital source of my energy and inspiration day in and day out,” he says, “and I never ran out of things to learn from them. I would like to sincerely thank them for their support and generosity over the years.”

Anny Jones
Humanities

As a humanities teacher at St. Paul’s for nearly three decades, Anny Jones always tried to help students take risks and regard reading and writing as an adventure.

Jana F. Brown

After nearly two decades of teaching at three different secondary schools in her native England, Anny Jones was hoping a yearlong exchange at St. Paul’s School would offer her a different educational perspective. When she arrived on the campus of St. Paul’s for an interview in the spring of 1993, Jones thought she “had come to paradise.” She eventually accepted a full-time post and began her tenure in the English Department that fall. Jones ended up teaching at St. Paul’s for 27 years until her retirement at the end of the 2019-20 academic year.

Jones grew up in Kent, along the River Medway, in the Southeast of England. The marshes accenting the river, she notes, were the setting for the opening scenes of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. She was drawn to books from the get-go. “They couldn’t stop me,” Jones says of her prolific childhood reading habit. She studied English and related literature at the University of York, before almost by accident becoming a teacher. She became the first full-time female faculty member at the all-boys Clifton College in Bristol, and later taught English and Theory of Knowledge for the International Baccalaureate at the co-ed Sevenoaks School in Kent. Just before she came to St. Paul’s in the U.S., she served as head of the English Department at St. Paul’s School for Girls in London.

Although Jones was always preparing students for demanding external examinations, the various curriculums actually gave individual teachers a lot of freedom. “You could reinvent your syllabus every year,” she recalls. By the time she was asked by longtime SPS faculty member George Carlisle to interview for a job at the St. Paul’s School across the pond, Jones’s son and daughter had left for college, and she was looking for a new experience. At SPS, Jones taught English to Fifth Formers in her first years at the School and for many years taught electives on such topics as Dante’s The Divine Comedy (she is passionate about Dante and close to completing a book on him) and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Jones also became a founding member of the innovative Humanities V curriculum at St. Paul’s.

“The Humanities Program was really set up with two main intentions,” she says. “One was not to do a series of texts in isolation, but to teach texts in thematic or historical clusters. And the SPS humanities model regarded texts not only as written works such as novels or plays, but also movies, artworks, legal documents, photographs – all manner of things. We developed new assignments that would nourish students’ personal, creative, and analytical writing, going far beyond the rigid five- paragraph essay to embrace art documentaries, Unessays, graphic novel spreads, and so on. The kind of suppleness that encourages is very useful as the world of higher education and work is changing so rapidly.”

Looking for a fresh range of material, Jones later taught Humanities III and creative writing, always trying to help students take risks, and regard reading and writing as an adventure. Outside the classroom, Jones spent many years as a beloved adviser and colleague. She oversaw the Schlesinger Writer-in-Residence program, which brought to SPS writers such as the twin Dickman poets, Jericho Brown, British artist Glen Baxter, and Jules Feiffer. She traveled to India and South Korea on School-sponsored trips and organized India Week and Korea Week at SPS, bringing world-class traditional and ultra-modern performers to the School. Jones also served as adviser to the student literary magazine, Horae Scholasticae, and was for many years the chair of the Hugh Camp Cup public speaking competition. Outside SPS, she enjoyed delivering quirky but scholarly lectures on art, literature and history at the Kimball Jenkins Estate in Concord on such topics as Hay, Laundry, Sunflowers, Apples, and Silk and Anxiety in the Renaissance. “Who knew sunflower oil was one of the reasons Hitler invaded Russia?” she says.

It was also at St. Paul’s that Jones met her husband, Michael Orsillo, the longtime accompanist to the SPS Ballet Company and composer for the Theatre Program. The couple enjoyed traveling together in Europe and elsewhere. In her summers away from Concord, Jones restored a farmhouse in Normandy, France, built an elaborate garden with a sphinx and other sculptures, and enjoyed visits with her two children and five grandchildren. Jones credits St. Paul’s for the opportunity to attend a writing workshop in Italy under the tutelage of poet Marie Howe (who later visited SPS as a Schlesinger Writer) and for supporting her pursuit of an M.F.A. at Pacific University in Oregon. From her years studying for her master’s, Jones was able to produce dozens of poems, the book on Dante, and countless essays. She has been hard at work on a trio of novels, to which she will devote her time in retirement.

She has cherished her years working with colleagues, including George Carlisle, Alisa Barnard ’94, George Chase, Cindy Foote, Ruth Sanchez, and Sonia Czarnecki, along with many other faculty and staff. “I like teaching enormously and was frankly a little worried about retiring,” Jones says. “It is one of the most pleasurable ways of passing your life, sharing ideas with teenagers. I realize something a little uncanny about being a teacher; your students never get old. Decades pass and you are still immersed in a world full of all this wonderful youthful energy.”

Terry Wardrop ’73
Science

In his 37 years on the faculty, technology pioneer Terry Wardrop ’73 spearheaded robotics and engineering programs and gave his students opportunities to be successful.

Ashley Festa

It’s hard to know in which way Terry Wardrop ’73 had the greatest impact at St. Paul’s – teaching and mentoring his students or introducing the campus to the Internet. As the “technology evangelist” at St. Paul’s from 1983 to 1998, Wardrop upgraded the School from having just one mainframe computer to having a personal computer for every student in every classroom. He installed the Ethernet network and reconfigured each classroom to accommodate the technology. To accomplish this formidable task, Wardrop recruited his students for hands-on learning opportunities.

“Terry took me under his wing,” says Rob Leslie ’91, who helped build the first wide-scale network at SPS. “It’s hard to look back at St. Paul’s without remembering his valuable mentorship and advocacy.” Juggling a million-dollar technology budget left Wardrop little time for mentoring, advising, and coaching students. So, in the late 90s, he took a yearlong sabbatical to figure out his academic plan moving forward. It included recording an album so he could better advise his Independent Study students on writing and recording music. He also played guitar in a faculty rock band for many years, performing the national anthem Jimi Hendrix-style every July 4 for the Advanced Studies Program.

Wardrop developed an artificial intelligence class, introducing students to the work of Alan Turing, who cracked German codes during World War II. He visited England for an in-depth study of the mathematician on the 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth and soon became the local expert on Turing’s work. The SPS Robotics Program, which has sent teams to the FIRST Robotics Competition since 2005, was Wardrop’s brainchild. While most high schools participate as a club activity, he added FIRST Robotics to the St. Paul’s engineering design curriculum. “It’s the hardest problem students will ever face,” he says of the pressure of problem- solving on the fly in competition. “If you have that on your résumé, employers know what you’re capable of.”

Wardrop also helped create an Engineering Honors Program, which is now called the Applied Science and Engineering Program (ASEP) and includes a variety of STEM fields. In the program, Wardrop has helped his students secure summer internships at laboratories at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, among others. Upon their return in the fall, students complete a capstone project.

Brian O’Sullivan ’16, a member of the program’s first cohort, interned at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. “He didn’t compare students to each other, but rather he compared them to themselves,” says O’Sullivan, who graduated from Columbia University in May. “He gave me opportunities to be successful.”

As a student, Wardrop attended St. Paul’s as it transitioned from all boys to co-ed and met his future wife, Mary ’73. He later graduated from Queen’s University in Ontario and worked as a systems analyst for General Motors of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Revenue. In 1983, he joined the St. Paul’s faculty. Working in a field heavily populated by boys, Wardrop worked to draw girls into his engineering and robotics courses and, at his retirement, nearly half of participants in the ASEP program were girls – many also competed in the FIRST Robotics competition.

Vicky Thomas ’07 looks back fondly on Wardrop’s guidance; watching her write her first computer program, taking her team to the FIRST Robotics regionals, and mentoring her Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam. “I try to pay that inspiration forward to the next generation, especially to other young women,” says Thomas, an MIT alumna.

Wardrop will teach artificial intelligence at ASP in the summer but, as for retirement, he plans to take a break, play guitar, and visit his twin daughters – Megan ’97 and Sarah ’97 – and their families, including his grandson, Ben. But he’ll miss the St. Paul’s community and students. “Watching students develop their own curiosity and their own ideas of what they want to do,” he says, “that never got old.”