James Ewer | Lower School Dean

What music are you listening to lately? Jazz music is on all the time, or music from Hamilton

What’s one of the last books you read? The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs.

What’s your favorite time of year? I love me some summer … but fall is great for traveling and enjoying family!

What’s one of the most adventurous things you’ve ever done? I lived in Peru for three months working at an orphanage and a school that supported students with high needs.

What is your favorite Breck lunch? Bring on those brussel sprouts. Also, all the creamy soups hit the spot.

What’s your dream job? I would love to open my own restaurant or winery one day.

What’s one of the best decisions you’ve ever made? To get a job at a really young age. It helped me understand the value of money and how to start investing for the future.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Love yourself always. Give yourself grace to make mistakes.

What do you remember from kindergarten? Drawing a picture of myself standing in front of a class of students as a teacher. My parents still have that picture in their home!

What is the most important room in your home? The kitchen. I love to cook and break bread with friends and family.

What’s your favorite place on the Breck campus? Anywhere that has coffee machines so I can get my daily mocha.

Favorite comfort food? Country fried steak and sweet potato pie.

Favorite treat: salty or sweet? Sweet all day … specifically cheesecake if anyone wants to bake one and bring it in for me.

If you had a theme song, what would it be? “Feelin’ Good,” by Nina Simone.

Favorite line from a movie? “I don’t scratch my head unless it itches, and I don’t dance unless I hear some music. I will not be intimidated. That’s just the way it is.” — Coach Boone, Remember the Titans

Favorite family tradition? I do almost all of the cooking on Thanksgiving. Feel free to stop by if you want prime rib!

Three people — living or dead — you’d want to have dinner with? Barack Obama, James Baldwin, and Miles Davis.

If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?

I’ve never been to Africa. It’s on my bucket list.

What’s your pet peeve?

When you don’t leave a place cleaner than you found it.

What keeps you up at night?

Knowing we are trying to support young people and give them the skills and efficacies necessary when we don’t know how the world will be in the coming year.

What music are you listening to lately? Spotify tells me I listened to music from 52 different countries, but my teenage daughter tells me all my music tastes are outdated and lame.

What’s one of the last books you read? Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

What’s your favorite time of year? Thanksgiving. It’s pure gratitude with people you love without the distraction of gifts and parties.

What’s one of the most adventurous things you’ve ever done? Climbing Mount Rainier with some friends and encountering an avalanche on a glacier at 12,000 feet.

What was your favorite Breck lunch? Tater tots. I could eat them by the plateful, and they met all my food group requirements at the time.

What’s your dream job? I’m pretty much doing it now. I gave up on my dream of being a professional tennis player when I couldn’t beat Wade Martin ’89 over four years for our #1 singles spot.

What’s one of the best decisions you’ve ever made? Agreeing to go on a blind date where I met my wife, Krista.

What advice would you give to your younger self? Get uncomfortable — you’ll grow and learn a lot more in the process.

What do you remember from kindergarten? Knocking over toy blocks that a cute girl was using so that she would talk to me. Krista would say my technique hasn’t improved much over the years.

What is the most important room in your home? Our kitchen. It’s where we begin and end each day as a family.

What’s your favorite place on the Breck campus? I have good memories of stopping by the chapel when it was empty and realizing there was a much bigger picture than whatever exam or deadline I was facing.

Favorite comfort food? Spumoni ice cream — straight from the container while watching ESPN after everyone’s gone to bed.

Favorite treat: salty or sweet? Salty. I’m a heavy sweater.

If you had a theme song, what would it be? “I Hold On” by Dierks Bentley.

Favorite line from a movie? “Get busy living, or get busy dying” from Shawshank Redemption .

Favorite family tradition?

Spending a week every summer in northern Wisconsin with our kids where we unplug and spend a lot of time on the water.

Three people — living or dead — you’d want to have dinner with? Nelson Mandela, Andre Agassi, and my Dad. I’d drop the first two in a heartbeat for one last conversation with my Dad.

If you could travel anywhere, where would you go? Croatia.

What’s your pet peeve? Complaining. It doesn’t solve anything.

What keeps you up at night?

Type 1 Diabetes. Our daughter was diagnosed 10 years ago, and we get up nightly to adjust her insulin levels. We’re all in on the fight to find a cure through JDRF.

A number of Breck Upper School artists showcased their pieces at the 17th Annual Shattuck-St.

1. Upper School marimba band BATO! BATO! performed on the International Bazaar Stage at the 2022 Minnesota State Fair.

2. In October, Elena Bui ’23 was sponsored by the USA Gymnastics Federation to travel alongside National Team members to represent the United States at an international rhythmic gymnastics tournament in Amsterdam. Competing against distinguished rhythmic gymnasts from across the globe, Bui placed in all four events and the all-around. Most significantly, she made the acclaimed achievement of qualifying for and placing in the event finals.

3. James Hicks ’23 played in the Minnesota All-State Symphonic Band in August at Concordia College, Moorhead.

4. Cole Hester ’31 had his art featured at the Minnesota State Fair. Hester received a blue ribbon for black and white photography and a third premium ribbon for general photography.

5. Eva Breiland ’23, Floria Elliot ’23, Sarah Feng ’23, John Gorman ’23, Sarah Peterson ’23, Trisha Samba ’23, and Kendall White ’23 were all recognized as semifinalists in the 2022–23 National Merit Scholarship Program.

6. Zoe Jagiela ’23 won both a gold medal and a silver medal in poetry at the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Only 2,000 of the 260,000 submissions received national recognition. Jagiela traveled to Carnegie Hall in New York City in June 2022 to receive these national awards. Additionally, she won the most poetry awards in the Minnesota Writing Region in both 2021 and 2022.

7. Barbara Jacobs-Smith won the Minnesota Elementary Science Teacher of the Year award for 2022–23 from the Minnesota Science Teachers Association.

8. Sébastien Saunoi-Sandgren received the 2022–23 Minnesota French Teacher of the Year award from the American Association of Teachers of French.

9. Vladimir Tsiper ’25 was interviewed on and recorded several pieces on the violin for the NPR show From The Top, which highlights the astounding performances and captivating personal stories of talented classically-trained young musicians from across the country.

10. Zoe Roberts ’23 competed in the Grand National and World Championship Morgan Horse shows in Oklahoma City in October with horses Marti (pictured) and Junior. With Junior, she was the National Champion and the Reserve World Champion in the Saddle Seat Equitation 14–17 division; she was also top 10 in the AMHA Saddle Seat Gold Medal Finals and in the UPHA Morgan Challenge Cup National Finals. With Marti, she was the Reserve National Champion and top 10 in the World Championships.

11. Visual Arts Department Chair Michal Sagar presented a solo art show, What Remains, at Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis from October 06–November 12, 2022.

12. Václav (Vašek) Verner ’24 won the Jaroslav Heyrovský award, the most prestigious science award given to high school students in the Czech Republic. Verner achieved this award because of his Gold Medal placement at this year’s International Chemistry Olympiad. The award is named after Jaroslav Heyrovský, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of polarography; he is one of only two Czech Nobel Prize winners ever.

Briefly Noted

Sarah Flotten ’85, LJ Paul , and Kim Schafer served as Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) translation leaders for the Science of Teaching and School Leadership Academy at the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning in July 2022. Breck faculty are leaders in MBE and helping teachers across the country understand the science of teaching and how to improve the student experience.

Annual Giving Director Susan Cossette received two Pushcart poetry nominations and has poetry forthcoming in the New York Quarterly and ONE ART

Assistant Upper School Director/Upper School Dean Chris Ohm continues to make Breck proud as the announcer for the University of St. Thomas football team.

BACK TO THE BASICS Lower School focuses on literacy

Each issue of Today at Breck will include operational updates of things happening across divisions at Breck. For this issue, we focused on literacy in Lower School. Breck has long had a tradition of excellence in reading and writing. However, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lower School leadership team recognized that Lower School students needed more support with foundational literacy — and, in turn, teachers needed additional professional development and instructional support to help align their approach with the most up-to-date research of literacy pedagogy.

“We really need to take more of a comprehensive look at the whole work of literacy — which really has a lot of components — and think about how we’re going to strategize to make sure we’re up to date on all of it,” says Lower School Director Katie Mahoney.

The Lower School is now in year two of a multiyear study and development plan around literacy education, focusing this year on phonemic awareness, phonics, word study, and vocabulary. Next year, they will focus their efforts on independent reading, guided reading, and literature study. The following year will center on writing. While students begin learning to read and write in early childhood classrooms, all Lower School teachers are involved in and will benefit from this holistic assessment of literacy at Breck. B

This fall, the Lower School hosted its first-ever Parent Education About Kids (PEAK) Learning Lab event on literacy. At the event, teachers invited parents into their classrooms to learn about their work on literacy and why it’s so fundamentally important in their children’s learning and development. “One thing that parents kept saying at the event was ‘There’s so much science behind this work,’” says Mahoney. “They didn’t realize that all of our work on literacy has so much intentionality behind it.”