Pacifica Stories

One of the best things about working in a school like Pacifica is our teachers' love for learning, which encompasses their students' learning as well as their own. It's second nature for them to find ways to learn more about their subject and to hone their craft of teaching, and for two members of our English department, that curiosity carried straight into summer break.

Katie Savage, Chair of the English Department, and Hilary Miller, Director of Faculty and Academics, didn't sign up for a conference or a workshop this summer. Instead, they built their own: a self-designed writers retreat, carved out of a season most people spend simply catching their breath.

Katie has taught for more than fifteen years, eight of them at Pacifica. Hilary has taught for ten—four at a public high school in Indiana, six at Pacifica—two schools that, she says, "despite being very different on their face," both had "a tight-knit community that I've adored."

Writing is a shared passion for both of them, something they pursue outside the classroom as much as inside it. They're currently working on a narrative together, and the retreat became a chance to sharpen that project alongside their own craft. "Writing fulfills me creatively, which in turn makes me a better teacher," Hilary said. Katie described it similarly: a way "to hone our skills, remind us of why we love it, and also offer a creative outlet that would rejuvenate us."

What they came back with wasn't just pages. It was a renewed sense of what their students go through every time they're handed a writing assignment. "We are so often assigning writing to students, and it's easy to forget the struggle that comes with it," Katie said. Sitting with a blank page themselves reminded them how to talk students through writer's block and a rough first draft, not as something to fix quickly, but as part of the process every writer works through.

Even the retreat's structure taught them something. They found themselves reaching for unconventional materials like different-sized post-its and index cards that Katie is already planning to bring into her classroom. And in the quiet stretches between writing, conversation kept circling back to teaching itself, and to Pacifica's core values, and how easy it would be, without real intention, to drift from them. "This can't just be an institutional practice; it must be an individual one," Hilary said. "Retreats like this are opportunities to remind and encourage each other in the good work of teaching students to think and live well."

Maybe the most lasting lesson was the simplest one. "Teaching can easily become a vacuum," Hilary said. "Like so many endeavors that require vulnerability, once you begin sharing your fears and mistakes, you find that you're not the only one to have them." For any teacher weighing their own summer plans, her advice is direct: find what fills your cup, and don't treat it as optional. "Because so much of teaching is pouring out your cup, it's imperative that those soul-lifting practices are made a priority... sometimes choosing those things over the to-do list actually makes you a much better teacher."