Fresh Faces: Meet Cate’s New Teachers

By Alpha Abulikemu' 29

Cate’s teachers, along with the students, are the soul of our school. They’re the ones responsible for guiding students in their learning and enforcing the rules that shape our community. This year, we welcome four new teachers, each with their own life experiences, teaching styles, and ideas. There is Ms. Vendler, who teaches English; Mr. Ricciardi, who teaches Japanese; Mr. Schofield, who teaches Math; and Mme. Maillard, who teaches French. Each of them had a different journey in life, but they all converged on this Mesa this year.

Ms. Vendler

Ms. Vendler’s journey to Cate wasn’t a single decision. As she puts it, “No one thing brought me to Cate. In many ways, it feels as though my life brought me to Cate, by some gravitational pull, some accumulating momentum.” That momentum started early. As a kid at a French elementary school, she came home announcing to her parents, “I love conjugations!” Years later, she played in a squash tournament on Cate’s now-decommissioned courts, long before she knew she would teach here. Later on, in her first semester of college, she “dropped a class the night before add-drop…and instead took Introduction to Lyric Poetry,” a class that led her to major in English. And, having grown up in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, she says the valley between the Pacific and the Transverse Ranges “has always been home.”

Before arriving on the Mesa, Ms. Vendler was finishing a joint MBA and Master’s in Education at Stanford, right up until move-in day: “I attended my last class, jumped in my car, dropped off my wifi router, and was home free.”

In the classroom, her love of literature is impossible to miss. She admits that she “sometimes speaks in tongues, quoting poetry ecstatically like it’s scripture.” She hopes her students learn that “literature is always available to them as a solace, as a friend, to help clarify and articulate whatever they may be feeling.” She also wants them to ask questions about every word and line break. While shadowing a senior in Ms. Caylor’s neurobiology class, she heard Ms. Caylor cry, “Form and function!”, which was “the same thing I cry to my students, only about literature instead of sheep brains.” Ultimately, she hopes students leave her class with “the power to interrogate the world.”

When asked about her favorite moment at Cate, her first response was “Please don’t ask me to choose!” Still, a few stood out, such as “watching the sunset climb the face of Half Dome with a dozen 10th-graders who howl at each other like wolves”; witnessing 9th-graders successfully cue a guesser to identify “a specific shade of orange among a palette of 480 colors, without ever using the word ‘orange’”; and blasting 2016 throwbacks while coaching JV tennis. For her, “these moments arrive routinely as waves on a shore, and each day I paddle back out for more.”

Outside of school and around the area, Ms. Vendler enjoys farmers' markets and alpaca farms, but mostly she is “unhealthily obsessed” with her “seven-year-old dog, Milo.” And if none of that surprises you, she was bitten by a shark!

Mr. Ricciardi

Mr. Ricciardi is not your typical Japanese teacher. Coming from Salt Lake City, he graduated from high school at 16 and only started learning Japanese at 19. He taught English in Japan for three years before returning to the US, taught at Phillips Exeter, and finally arrived at Cate. He speaks not only Japanese and English but also Spanish and Italian, and he told us that he’s “always open to talk in Japanese… or Spanish [with students]”. 

In his first month at Cate, he immediately began immersing himself in the community, helping lead a Yosemite pod on the Ten Lakes Trail, considered one of the more challenging Yosemite trails, with Mr. Shapiro. He was surprised by the Cate community’s spirit, mentioning that “even if people are goofing around, kind of being lazy until the last second, they really come together [when there’s something to be done]”. So far, his favorite moment in Cate was “waking up early, just having coffee, talking to students, [and] looking out at the sunrise” at Raisin Lake in Yosemite.

In his Japanese classes, he uses communication as the core for his teaching, stating that “my style is all about communication… [the student] thinks of the questions [and] keeps the conversation going”. That’s also why he aims for the class to be 90% Japanese-speaking by year two and 100% by year three, allowing students to learn through Japanese conversations rather than simply listening to lectures. 

Despite being a new teacher, Mr. Ricciardi is already thinking about activities that can help improve this community. He mentioned his ideas for a trip to Little Tokyo and a language lunch table, or another opportunity for students to practice their language skills outside of class. This eagerness to help the community aligns with his reasons for becoming a teacher: “the relationships that you get to build… and helping [students] to grow as people.”

Mr. Schofield ’22

A Cate alum, Mr. Schofield ’22, is no stranger to the Mesa. He studied physics and math in college but found education “more interesting,” and Mr. Shapiro “texted him about the opening,” which prompted him to return. As someone who was here just a few years ago as a student, Mr. Schofield ’22 found some of the students' struggles relatable, stating that he “would stay up after lights out getting my homework done” back in his days at Cate. Mr. Schofield ’22 also mentioned that he had unintentionally made a major public mistake as a senior. Yet, the community still supported and forgave him, and he wished students could also know that this community is a forgiving place.

He considers the biggest surprise when returning to Cate not the Colab or the changes in facilities, but rather how school culture is handled, saying that “It’s not that [the culture] is different. We had very similar expectations, but now there are signs up in the dining hall telling you how to act… It’s a little funny to feel myself enforcing it now as a faculty.” 

Mr. Schofield ’22’s teaching style can be seen by the speech he gave in front of all his classes, in which he declared that “[he] doesn’t really care too much about the content. [He] wants students to take away… soft skills of how to communicate well [and] work well in teams.” His goal for this year was fundamentally to “make choices [that are] pro connection.” He mentioned that, back in his days at Cate, Mr. Shapiro talked to him about how he was being a “bad lab partner” and how he could do better, and that fundamentally influenced both his actions back then and his teaching style today, as he hopes to have a similar effect for his students. 

Outside of school itself, he also has many hobbies. He played D&D and Magic: The Gathering, ran Super Smash Bros. tournaments, sang and played guitar in a college band, and plays acoustic guitar in his backyard at night. 

Mme. Maillard

Mme. Maillard, who currently teaches French 2, moved to Santa Barbara 27 years ago from the Champagne region of France. She has taught for more than 25 years, including at UCSB, Laguna Blanca, and Pine Crest in Florida, before coming to Cate. She started teaching because she wanted to be in a profession “where you have to take care of people,” which, for her, meant becoming a teacher. That’s also why she found the Cate community particularly interesting, as “seeing [students] smile… and say good morning and thank you and goodbye is priceless in this school.”

Different from Mr. Schofield ’22, she derived her teaching style not from her previous teachers but rather from the antithesis of them, saying that, in her time at high school, “the teachers were old school. So it was just studying, studying, studying.” However, she wanted her classes to be different. She described her style as wanting “the interaction, the game, the fun in the classroom.” That’s why she changed her lesson plan before a quiz so the class could study together. Afterward, “[the students] left more confident and… braver about the fact that you will be quizzed.”

One of her favorite childhood experiences, as she described, was living in Guadeloupe at ages 8–9, learning Creole and some traditional dances, and living next to a cookie factory. "My siblings and I would go to school each morning with warm cookies in our hands!" she exclaimed. Today, outside of school, she “plays piano, bakes, hikes, and makes collage art.”

Our new faculty members have already begun immersing themselves in the community while adding their own ideas and flavors. From Mr. Schofield ’22 ’s speech of “Even if you think that you have nothing to say, you do”, to Mr. Ricciardi’s goal of giving his students the “ability to study hard, work hard, and achieve a goal”, each new faculty member is, in their own way and style, making Cate a better place.