Jon Dicus Steve Kaback

Dicus discovered passion for education through travel experiences

Sofia Perlman | Copy Editor

For 31 years, Jon Dicus has brought energy and passion to his classes at the Upper School. Through his travels and experiences, Dicus found a passion for the Spanish language as well as working with young people before he ever became a teacher. After studying French for many years, Dicus began learning Spanish in college in order to do anthropology research in Costa Rica. He says, “I had a fantastic experience [in Costa Rica]. Although I had enjoyed French, something clicked with Spanish and I came back for my senior year and I took more Spanish.” After graduating college, Dicus worked as a Spanish camp counselor at Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji for six years where his interest in education grew. Before he began teaching at Blake, Dicus went on an eight month backpacking trip through Mexico and Central America. His Spanish speaking skills greatly improved over the course of his travels. “Those experiences kind of showed me that I like working with young people, and education could be a field that I could go into. Up until then I didn’t really know quite what I wanted to do,” Dicus explains.

Dicus has taught every Spanish class except for Spanish 1 as well as Latin American Studies and Human Geography. He has enjoyed teaching partly due to the character of the students. He says, “The students are interested, they’re engaged, they’re willing to do the work.” Dicus also emphasizes his appreciation for his colleagues, noting, “They’re all really passionate and they’re all really interesting people and I’ve met a lot of great friends teaching here.”

The school has given Dicus the freedom to personalize his classes, as well as many valuable opportunities. “There’s a fair amount of autonomy for teachers to [add to the curriculum]. Blake has given me a lot of professional development opportunities. Funds to travel, go to conferences, present at conferences, and I’ve done all of that.” Dicus was also able to create his own study abroad program for students where they traveled to Central Mexico’s monarch butterfly hibernation sanctuaries. He also initiated a bike trip to Northern Argentina with 16 students.

Eva Mateo, Spanish teacher and longtime colleague of Dicus, will greatly miss Dicus’ presence after his retirement, she says, “He can always find a way to connect with people. Working with him is great because he’s always willing to support you. He always works to make things better for the department, and I think he does the same thing with the students.”

Dicus assists Megan O’Connell ‘26 with a game for his Spanish 2 students where they have to match answers to slips of paper posted outside of his room.

Dicus plans on taking time to travel and spend time outdoors before he decides on how he wants to continue his career.

Wellknown among students and faculty for his enthusiasm and bright personality for the last 18 years, Steve Kaback will conclude his time at the Upper School at the end of this year.

Kaback explains his journey to physics, saying, “I was at first interested in humanities questions, I was interested in cause and effect. I wanted to understand the era that I was in high school. Why were we seeing the political, economic, and social stories that I was experiencing?”

Kaback was drawn to physics through his desire to understand the world, stating, “I realized in college that the human story wasn’t sufficient enough for me to really understand what was going on. I wanted to understand the human species and know how everything came about, what the physical story was. Guess what had the answer to that? Physics.”

Reflecting on his journey, Kaback notes, “It was very much a philosophical pathway into the discipline… to me it’s really about these rules that mother nature has laid out and using those rules to kind of extrapolate to understand the world that we’re occupying and how that influences human beings too.”

Kaback began teaching “by accident.” While studying physics research, he became connected with a professor who worked in physics as well as education. Kaback mentions, “It was not intentional. It was that curvy path that your life takes and the people that you meet and when you find someone who’s doing something that’s interesting and compelling to you, then sometimes you get caught up in that… All of the sudden I was a teacher.”

The professor he worked with began teaching at Blake, and then he hired Kaback.

Kaback has taught Precalculus, Astronomy, Regular and Honors Physics, AP Physics 1, and AP Physics C. He believes that the best part of teaching is the students, stating, “It’s so great to spend my day working with really bright, interested, motivated, curious about the world young bodies. I think that is forever inspirational… It’s just great to see people get excited to discover this stuff. It helps me discover new stuff.”

Jeff Trinh, physics teacher and good friend of Kaback, notes, “He contributes [to the community] in so many ways. He’s got an energy about him and a gravity about him. People just love going to him and getting help and chatting… He’s always around. He’s got passion, he cares.”

After leaving the Upper School, Kaback will be working as a curriculum writer at Honeywell, a company that creates cutting-edge technology. He will continue to teach, working with physicists to help engineers and production managers bring products to the public.

Staff members share need for less transactional relationships

Amelia Bush | Managing Editor

How many names of the faculty and staff at school do you know? Would you feel comfortable going to them with any issues you have? What if those issues are about their jobs?

But what does it mean to be a member of the staff or faculty at the Upper School? Jim Mahoney, English teacher and college counselor, clarifies, “Staff is admin, technically. Basically you have a different performance evaluation standard, versus faculty who are being assessed as teachers…it’s also different pay scale and a different calendar.” Sarah Warren, Assistant Director of the Upper School, agrees, adding, “Our building and grounds people are staff, but I think they are catagorized differently than