When you think of someone new to Parker, you often think about the students and overlook the teachers.

Parker has an exceptional “handshake” for introducing new faculty to the school. A significant part of the transition was “a new-to-Parker day-orientation type of thing,” new Assistant Athletic Director Laura Gill said, “where I got to meet a couple people that I had never met before.”

A number of teachers gave positive views of the orientation day. Upper School Chemistry Teacher Ryan Zaremba liked it, but said it was a lot to take in.  “It is a lot of information,” he said. “They acknowledge that from the very beginning, but I think if it were to take up more than one day, it would be too much.”

Behind this daylong event there is a committee that helps new teachers get acclimated to Parker.  “There is a new staff committee, and faculty who have welcomed us in the summer, and we have meetings throughout the year–that has been really helpful,” new Middle School counselor, Reyna Smith, said. “The transition has been so smooth.”

Not only is there an institutionalised introduction for the new teachers–there is also the casual, more personal one. “A lot of middle school teachers have stopped by and asked me how it’s been going, and that really helped,” Smith said. “It’s the little things that help smooth the transition.”

Gill had been coaching at parker for 3 years, so all of this was fairly simple for her, but not all teachers had this luxury. Some were fish yanked from another pond.

Zaremba hails from a public school where it was normal to have classes of 30 students. Work ethic was different too. “Parker has a work ethic that is different from the public school I taught at,” Zaremba said. “When I taught at a public school, there were often students that would resist learning for various reasons. It was always a struggle to get the majority of students to buy-in to what you were trying to teach. Here, the buy-in is pretty much assumed. That is a huge positive adjustment.”

Zaremba has “always subscribed to the idea that if you jump into something, that’s how you learn best. “That’s kind of how I felt here, which was a good thing,” he said. “I also had lots of support along the way.”