Meet the New Faculty: Edgar Arceo

Edgar Arceo is a new faculty member who returned to Thacher this year after teaching at other boarding schools and various graduate programs. His expertise in education is shown in his past educational career, both as a student and a teacher. In an interview with The Notes, he talks about his life as a teenager, a college student, and a young adult. 

I grew up in Bishop, CA. It is in the Eastern Sierra. Both of my parents are immigrants from Mexico. They met there and raised my family for a while.

My first love was soccer. Ever since I was a child, I loved playing soccer. It is a gift from my dad, and I have much affinity for it. Soccer is how I met good friends from my [earlier] childhood and at high school and close friends from the undergraduate years of college. Soccer has been very present in my life, taught me a lot, and connected me with people. Now, I coach the varsity girl’s soccer team at Thacher. It also motivated me to get into college.

I didn’t like school growing up. In fact, I went to school because it had recess, and during recess, I could play soccer with my buddies. But seeing my parents’ narrative of coming to this country as immigrants and their value of education, the belief in its power and promise, I may try this college experience.

I looked to get a soccer scholarship so they wouldn’t have to pay for college. I would be able to satisfy their vision for their children while I could play soccer. 

I started liking soccer in my middle school years, and because I started liking it, soccer got easier. Fast forward to my senior year, I got rejected from many of the soccer schools I’ve been in touch with since my sophomore year in high school. In my sophomore year, I was getting handwritten letters from the UCLA coach and thought I would definitely play Division I soccer. By senior year, they changed their stance. An injury in my junior year threw me off my trajectory. But, because I have been studying and doing things outside of soccer, I ended up getting an academic scholarship.

I was an undergraduate student at Kenyon College, Ohio. I’ve done two master’s degrees, one of which was kind of accidental, to be honest. I started it when I was working at Thacher. I was hired as a Fisher Fellow in 2017 to teach psychology. After my first term, Mr. Hooper, the Dean of Faculty at that time, asked me to teach a Spanish course in winter. I jumped in but quickly realized that there was a lot about the Spanish language I had no idea of.

At the end of the year, Thacher asked me whether I would teach that class again. I said yes, but I also indicated that I needed some more professional assistance so that I could teach better. So, I applied to this 7-week-long language intensive program at Middlebury College. They required a few tests, which led them to reject my application. They said that I couldn’t join the program because my level of Spanish was too high, and it wasn’t meant for this. I never thought my level was that high. 

The alternative was a graduate degree. I never imagined having a graduate degree in Spanish. But why not? So I jumped in and did it, probably one of the hardest academic summers of my life. I got my butt whooped, but I made some awesome connections with professors and peers and came back with some cool ideas here at Thacher. 

That experience put me on the trajectory of doing grad school over the summer and teaching during the year. The next summer, I went back to Middlebury to do my second summer. Program combined with a master’s degree.

Between 2019 and 2021, during the academic years, I completed the Masters of Science and Education at UPenn. There are two types of masters, master of arts and master of science, and the latter is more research-heavy. Basically, I was doing two master’s degrees at the same time. It worked for me because I had the time, energy, and curiosity [to put in the work].

I began working at Deerfield in the same semester, and I was a faculty at Deerfield the whole time I was in the master’s program. Deerfield was a part of the Penn fellows program. He and three other fellows at my school were in the consortium of about 25 fellows working in multiple boarding schools. 

In 2020, the whole world shut down. I didn’t go to Middlebury over the summer and solely worked for the UPenn program. The next summer, I finished my program at UPenn. In the summer of 2021, I went back to Middlebury for the third summer; I finished the program in summer 2022. By then, I moved back to the West Coast and was working at a day school. 

Middlebury was super intensive. The program lasted for six weeks at a time for four summers. We had classes every day from 8 am to 2 pm. The rest of the day was spent with other language learners. It was basically an adult summer camp for language. People of all ages, from 18 to 80, joined the program. There were many different schools for many languages, such as French, German, Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and more. 

The goal of the program is to only speak, consume media, and listen in the target language. The entire layout was very intentional, intense, and concentrated. The participants tended to be teachers of my age. The program was intense for me but fun at the same time. It was literature-based, so I read many wonderful texts but also picked up the language on my own. For example, we read Don Quixote de la Mancha, one of the greatest novels of all time, with professors who are experts in this book. I was incredibly privileged to have this opportunity. 

The master’s of science in education was exceptionally practical. It gave me ideas and a framework to become the best teacher. Although I’m not there yet, I at least found a very clear vision of what I want to be. The UPenn program was the most consequential and professional program I have had so far.

During the school year, I would teach two classes, but I also had to do graduate work, read a lot, write a lot, and research a lot. I also had to coach, do the dorm duty, and attend the sit-down meals. Basically, I was a student who was also doing graduate work. But I loved it; I empathized with the students, and they empathized with me. The only caveat is that my experience occurred during COVID-19. 

Originally, the participants of the program, faculty from various boarding schools, went to UPenn over the summer and went back and forth to our schools. We would also meet up on other school sites, have weekends at UPenn, etc. But COVID made us just stay at school the whole time. There wasn’t any interconnection or travel. However, the idea itself was still solid.

Usually, fellows stay for only two years. I had a chance to stay and continue teaching there. But the issue was that I was four years into teaching at boarding schools, and I was in my twenties. The reality was that I was tired of not having as much social life as I wished. I wanted to travel, be in the city, and to be around people of my age. 

So, I ended up applying for the Fulbright fellowship. It is a program run by the US government in which you serve as an ambassador for education. The government pays for a full year of travel for the country of your choice. I applied for another master’s degree at Pamplona, Spain. I was listed as an alternate, which was the second place. 

But at that point, I fell in love with the idea of moving to Spain. I bought a plane ticket anyway. It was late July of 2021, and COVID-19 subsided a bit, but institutions took a hit. Therefore, the US consulate in Boston had many retirements and many workers who stopped working. The administration process was very slow; I never got my visa and couldn’t go to Spain. The ticket was scheduled for August, but I had to look elsewhere to go into the job market. I eventually chose to teach 8th-grade Spanish at Pasadena for two years.

I actually ended up going to Spain. After my first year at the school in Pasadena, I bought a plane ticket and emailed the directors of the Fulbright program. I met and bonded with the directors and graduate students at a conference they invited me to. 

I ended up going to Spain, and it was great for a different reason. I got to realize that this was not what I wanted to do. I came back to finish my last summer of graduate school at Middlebury. My hope is to travel there, but I would do a master’s degree here in the US, perhaps a doctorate degree in educational leadership. The question is when, and it’s yet to be determined. 

I came back from Spain and realized that Spanish isn’t what I want to pursue but instead the doctorate of education. I started to find jobs for education and realized how extensive the application process was. I needed about a year to go through it, and I remembered hearing that Mr. Sanchez was going on a sabbatical. I hoped to be his sabbatical replacement and apply to the graduate schools during that year. 

I heard back that Thacher was hiring internally for the sabbatical replacement, and I was offered to teach psychology instead. I totally forgot that I had this opportunity; I applied, interviewed, and took the job. I always sensed that I would come back to Thacher if there was a chance, but I envisioned that it would be later on in life. But life has neat ways of surprising you, and this was one of the biggest surprises I had yet. 

It’s exceptionally practical but so mysterious. Its definition is the scientific study of mental processes and observable behaviors. The question that drives psychology is: Why do we do what we do as human beings and even as animals? If you can understand that, then you can influence other people’s behavior and thinking as well as your own. 

You can apply psychology to help convince your audience or create an incentivizing system in the dorm, for instance. At the same time, we don’t even know where our consciousness comes from. We don’t know why we write poetry, make films, and organize knowledge while other seemingly creative animals don’t. 

The inner workings of our brain are yet to be discovered, and it’s a very humbling experience. We are just a small speck in this massive cosmos, and as cool, smart, and awesome as we think we are, there are forces far greater than that.

The class mainly delves into the hardware: brain, chemicals, and the interactions. The behavior, the mood, and the thinking. In general, it changes over the weeks. In one week, we can talk about intelligence, and in another week, we talk about serial killers and mental disorders, while in other weeks, we cover the anatomy of the brain. 

My biggest solo hobby these days is swimming. It’s only been a year. I used to run a lot to the point where my knees started hurting; I was barely thirty and had to keep it sustainable. I thought of other exercises I could do that would keep me fit while being sustainable. 

I didn’t know how to swim well: I could survive but could not do proper strokes. I began watching videos online and went to the pool to try out different techniques. I also had some help from my colleague, who was a former water polo coach. It was mostly showing up to the pool every morning and trying simple things. Now, I can swim decently and get a good workout out of it. 

My second hobby would be pottery. I enjoy hanging out in the studio at Thacher and in LA. Cooking is my pastime as well; I don’t cook as much as I used to, but it’s fun to cook. Otherwise, I enjoy reading, hanging out with friends, and watching movies. 

My gut feeling is absolutely yes. However, it depends on two big things. First, what are my goals, and what do I wish to get from the high school experience? The other big factor is family. The needs of my family and my own needs, what would make sense, and if it’d be fine with my family. 

Looking back, I wasn’t clear on what I wanted out of high school yet besides soccer, but I was very close to my family, so I’m unsure if it would’ve made the most sense. Whenever I see a student apply here, enroll, go through the experience, and graduate, I’m very impressed and humbled that they take on such a challenge. In my viewpoint, it is hard to be away from people who reared and saw you from a very young age; there’s no perfect substitute for that, despite how hard we try.