In the 2024-2025 school year, Sidwell’s Upper School welcomed four new faculty members: English Teacher and Asian American Studies Chair Aaron Hwang, Assistant Principal Nikolin Eyrich, Latin Teacher Hugh McElroy and College Counseling Director Joel Siepierski. These four individuals, coming from four different states and vastly different backgrounds, had different interpretations of their first nine months at Sidwell, but all enjoyed exploring the Quaker values and community. 

While Hwang grew up in the Washington area and attended Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, his prior teaching experience consisted  of teaching undergraduate students at the University of Iowa. 

When asked to compare the teaching styles required, he said that they were quite similar, “especially for 11th and 12th grade students.” However, he also said that he felt a definite difference in the students, saying that “people are more anxious here than in undergrad… it changed the energy.”

Hwang was happy to return to the place of his youth, stating, “It’s always super surreal to come back to a place that you’ve been before …I always have a little bit of a sense of like, oh, you never left.” Still, he noted that he had much to discover, saying, “There’s a big difference between living in the suburbs as a kid and living in the city as an adult.”

Hwang has many plans for his future at Sidwell; as the first Asian American Studies Chair, he is excited about the opportunity to build a program from the ground up. “It’s cool to have a sense [that] you could be a part of a change that is happening in a school because I think so often as a teacher, you go into places, and you learn… this is what works, and this is what doesn’t work. And it will never change,” Hwang said. One specific idea that he has is to create a section of the library for Asian American authors and center a book club around the texts he will curate for it. 

Hwang described many positive experiences in his first year. He went on to describe his favorite moments: “When a student tells me, ‘I’m not really an English person,’ or, ‘I didn’t really expect to like this course, but I really enjoyed your course and it turned things around and now…when I go to class, I’m taking notes and I’m high-fiving my bros when I make a good point’… That’s really heartwarming to me, to see somebody who didn’t expect to be engaged become engaged, I think is really cool.”

McElroy also grew up very close to Sidwell, attending Georgetown Day School and moving back to Washington after finishing his master’s degree in England. McElroy began his career in teaching as a substitute Latin teacher at GDS. After that, McElroy taught at Episcopal High School Alexandria for two years and The Field School for 17 years. 

McElroy was excited to work in the Washington area again: “I grew up in the area, I had friends who went to Sidwell, and I have had friends and colleagues who worked here before.”

Episcopal and Sidwell are the first schools McElroy taught at that had a religious affiliation. He noted the stark differences between his experiences at Sidwell and at Episcopal, a Christian boarding school. “Episcopal is much more of an institutionally and culturally traditional school than I’ve taught at in the past or went to, and compared to here at Sidwell as well,” he stated. 

McElroy is still learning about the Quaker aspect of the Sidwell community and is “still trying to figure out the ways in which the Quaker identity of the school percolates in explicit and implicit ways throughout Sidwell, including meeting for worship.”

Through teaching Latin classes at Sidwell’s Middle and Upper School, he felt that “the first couple of months here were sort of like a firehose of new information and sort of getting used to things being different.” McElroy has enjoyed seeing students participate in community events in different ways and particularly appreciated community gatherings, such as the assembly and songs sung before winter break and Arts Guild. 

By teaching more classes at the Middle School, McElroy feels that events where he’s “gotten to be a part of and see the Upper School community together” have been nice for him and have served as “windows into the culture of the community.” McElroy also recalled the Gogo assembly at Sidwell, which was one of his favorite memories at school this year. 

“Growing up in DC, Gogo was a part of my teenage years but it’s a big part of the soundtrack of life in DC for me, so I thought that was a really cool thing to have represented here to dedicate gathering time towards,” he stated.

McElroy reflected on his own experiences in school and how this has motivated his teaching style after he discovered that he enjoyed teaching and found it fulfilling: “there were elements of school that I really disliked, and so there was sort of a part of me that thought, and still thinks, that there’s some good that I would be able to do by trying to do things differently in my approach to teaching, in my approach of interacting with students, and some of the things that I had found really unhelpful about school.”

Unlike Hwang and McElroy, Siepierski is not a Washington native. From Western New York, he began his college counseling career in Buffalo, where he worked for 15 years. Most recently, he worked as the college counseling director at a private school in Naples, Fl. 

However, he was discontent with the lack of diversity, both social and political. “The short story is that I decided to leave there because [it was] Florida,” he said. “I was looking for a school…where the school’s values would align more with my own.” He continued, saying, “Anything political was controversial…you had to be very careful.” 

Siepierski was excited when he found out about the open position at Sidwell. He described how his search for a job this time was more “region-centered,” specifically on the Mid-Atlantic. As he attended Johns Hopkins University, he described the region as “friendly to [him].”

Beyond Sidwell’s geographic location, Sieperski was interested in the challenge that the academic environment would present. “Sidwell is Sidwell Friends,” he said. “It is…an elite school and the kids have very high expectations…[and] are very high performers, too.”

In the future Sieperski hopes to make the college counseling process more “student-centered.” 

Lastly, Eyrich has felt that her new position as Assistant Principal at Sidwell has combined different roles and experiences she has had in the past but also has allowed her to learn and do different things, focusing on the whole school rather than just her department. “I have always enjoyed working both with students and with curriculum development and faculty, so putting all of that together was really why the job description here spoke so much to me,” she expressed.

Sidwell is the third school Eyrich has worked at. Prior to Sidwell, she was the English Department Chair at Morristown Beard School in New Jersey. She also worked in Brooklyn at Poly Prep Country Day School as an English teacher, an Art History teacher and a Junior Dean. 

Eyrich brought her teaching experiences with her to Sidwell and taught Art History this past fall, and she felt that “getting to work with students every day in the classroom was a wonderful way for me to start so that I could get to know all [of the students]…Working with those students every day and getting a better understanding of the academic program from teaching in it was really helpful to me.”

Eyrich emphasized the welcoming community that stood out to her when she first arrived at Sidwell. The Quaker foundation of the school is still new to her, but she is learning more about the Quaker values every day, “such as the idea that we call each other friends and we reflect in silence together.” She has loved learning about the Quaker SPICES this year and the tradition of starting classes with a moment of silence.

“I have come to appreciate meeting for worship a lot. I really appreciate pressing pause on everything, the busyness, and just being able to reflect with everyone in a communal way,” she added. She also likes the “thoughtful way that decisions are made here,” which she feels is greatly influenced by Quaker practice and has been amazing to watch in action.