Meet Phillip Hadley

Phillip Hadley

By Zoey Patterson

Phillip Hadley is the new Applied Calculus teacher at Athenian. Though he’s teaching his Nexus class from Nova Scotia, he’s looking forward to interacting with Athenian students.

“Back in 2008, I started swim coaching at Athenian, and I was at another school at the time...the students that I was working with through the swim team, they were mature, they were motivated, they had a tremendous sense of a responsibility to the community and to themselves,” Hadley said.

Hadley also expressed interest in working with other members of the Athenian community.

“I’ve really been enjoying and appreciating the community of educators,” Hadley said. “There are so many passionate teachers at Athenian that care so deeply about the art and the science of teaching.”

Hadley explained what he liked so much about interacting with the teachers in particular.

“When you’re around passionate people about anything, I think that it’s infectious,” Hadley said.

Hadley’s own passion for math was rather latent, and all but absent when he was a student.

“I did not enjoy math in any of my secondary education...and then I ended up doing my degree in physics and philosophy, so I dealt with a lot of math,” Hadley said.

He particularly enjoys the class he teaches, Applied Calculus, partially because of its appeal to students.

“A lot of our examples come from peer reviewed papers, so they’re not things that are just made up, so it’s very easy to answer that question students invariably ask me, which is ‘when is this math ever useful?’” Hadley said. “Well, in this case, it’s super useful!”

The world around us, Hadley added, makes the course’s subject matter ever more relevant and helpful.

“We do a lot of modeling and a lot of data analysis and a lot of looking at graphs and tables, and I think that that is tremendously important, knowing how to do that well, and effectively,” Hadley said. “We are just inundated with graphs and tables and charts, and being able to sort through those and think about them critically, I think, is an important skill to have.”

Math, however, is not the only powerful thing Hadley finds important in his day-to-day life.

“I can talk about film all day long...the power of film, to me, is it’s visual,” Hadley said.

Hadley has two favorite films: M, a 1931 German film, and The Bicycle Thief, a post-World War II Italian film, and loves both because they harness this power.

“With M, it’s a silent film, and yet the storyline is very easy to follow, and I would say even more so with The Bicycle Thief, because...it’s in another language and there’s very few subtitles, and I always say you could get along just fine without the subtitles,” Hadley said. “They really come back to the actors’ acting and...the cinematography.”

While Hadley’s strengths and passions seem to be film and mathematics, less enjoyable things have also played a role in his life and shaped who he is today.

“When I was a teenager, I used to do door-to-door sales in my first year out of college, and then became a car salesman, and the lessons that I learned in people skills in those two experiences were absolutely tremendous,” Hadley said. “I’m a terrible salesman...but I learned an awful lot about people during that time.”

This year, Hadley is excited to learn about the people at Athenian and how they’ve changed since he started coaching swimming here.

“Somehow, miraculously, the kids are even better,” Hadley said.