Incoming head of school Julia de la Torre engaged in a lengthy Skype interview with the WordsWorth staff shortly after her selection as head. Now, as she joins us on campus for her first “official” visit, we offer this look into her past and present and her hopes for the future.

 

The Early Years

 

“You know Julia, you’re going to be a principal someday.” For Incoming Moorestown Friends Head of School Julia de la Torre, these were just the encouraging words of a proud mother supporting her daughter on the first day of her job as a teacher. She never could have imagined that, one day, those words would ring true.

 

Julia de la Torre grew up in Houston, Texas, a place she described as having a large Mexican American population. This particular fact had a big effect on her growing up, as many peers thought she was of Mexican heritage: “I spent a lot of my childhood trying to figure out what I really was.” de la Torre’s family heritage is a unique one – her parents were Argentinian and German. Her family cultures and her schooling played a large role in her upbringing. de la Torre attended a Catholic school in Houston and visited her grandparents in Germany and Argentina each summer.  The school she attended was similar to Moorestown Friends in that it was Pre-K through 12th grade school with relatively small class sizes. de la Torre described her difficulties explaining her multiple heritages when she said, “What was hard for a lot of my teachers and my classmates to understand was how [someone can] belong to more than one culture.”

 

 

 

In addition to her heritage, de la Torre’s parents also played an influential role in her life. Her father was a engineer and her mother was a physician. As a student, de la Torre wanted to be a journalist: “I think what I liked about journalism – or the idea of it maybe, the fantasy – was that you get to talk to people, and I really enjoy learning people’s stories.” de la Torre cited storytelling and forming connections with people as additional reasons for interest in becoming a journalist.

 

 

Later on, de la Torre enrolled in an education class during her freshman at Haverford College as a French major. She was uncertain about taking the class,  as she had no prior teaching experience; however, she soon grew to enjoy the style of the class, which was structured more around how a student learns and less around how a teacher teaches. Inspired by the diversity of learning, de la Torre decided to pursue a career in teaching. de la Torre summed up her experience in the class by saying, “My entire first year, we spent a lot of time talking about ourselves as learners. What kind of stories do we bring into the classroom, what experiences do we bring, how do our experiences color everything we do, [and] how does it influence the way we learn?”

 

de la Torre used the experience she gained from this class, the teaching knowledge she accumulated during the remainder of her college career, and her expertise in French to land a job teaching French in Colorado. It was on her first day at that job that de la Torre’s mother called her and told her that de la Torre would one day be a principal. While many would be happy to hear those words, de la Torre was upset: “I said, no, I don’t want to be a principal, I want to be a teacher.”  However, de la Torre would soon come to learn that no one’s follows a linear path. For example, de la Torre cited her stint in the peace corps as a “giant deviation” from her life path, but went as far as to call her time in the peace corps the “single most influential experience of her life.”

 

 

After explaining her unpredictable path to get where she is today, de la Torre concluded with some advice for students, “I think [you should] follow the deviations. The path will follow you; don’t worry about keeping the linear path.”        

 

-Andrew Shah, Esha Nittoor, and Henry Powell

 

de la Torre Today

 

When de la Torre can find some time to herself, she likes to get outside to run and hike. However, a lot of de la Torre’s free time is spent with her young son, Evan. She jokes, “This is my life right now, following around a three-year-old.” Next year, her son will be attending Moorestown Friends in the Beginnings program, which includes preschool, prekindergarten, and kindergarten. She looks forward to finally being able to work at the school that her son attends. Elaborating, she remarked that this gives her a unique opportunity to see what her son’s school day is like, even if he may be a little reluctant for her to be peering over his shoulder. After meeting some of her son’s future teachers during a recent visit to Moorestown Friends, she thinks he’s “the luckiest kid in the world.”

 

Besides spending time with her family, de la Torre enjoys traveling the world. She began traveling from a young age to visit her grandparents in Germany and Argentina: “Travel for me as a kid was not this big, luxurious, exotic thing. It was where my grandparents lived.” When she was in college studying French, she received the opportunity to study in Paris. It was there she discovered her passion to experience life among diverse cultures. Things like “figuring out how to do your laundry in another language, figuring out how to buy your groceries and not get sick, figuring how to pay the bills in a foreign country” excited her because she loved to utilize her “wit and charm” to communicate. de la Torre enjoyed it so much that she wanted to continue.

Though her prior experience abroad was limited to North America, South America, and Europe, when she became a teacher she jumped on a rare opportunity to travel to Marrakech, Morocco, and teach English for a summer. Her most memorable traveling experience comes from her time on a camel trip in the middle of the desert: “I went on some shady forms of transportation to get to the middle of the desert where there was no civilization. It was me, some tourists, and [some of] the nomadic people of Morocco.” There was one particular moment when she was sitting among her fellow travelers and guides, reveling in the stars visible in the clear sky when she realized, “I had no common language with these people but we had this shared experience… That was the moment when I said, ‘This is what travel is.’ Travel is figuring out what [the common language is], whether it is language or not. What is the connection between me and the people that make up humanity?”

 

-Yashnoor Kaur and Serena Lin

 

 

LOOKING AHEAD

“There was a lot of screaming involved,” de la Torre said of her reaction to learning she had gotten the Head of School position. “It was a pretty special day in my house and in my family.” The first thing de la Torre did was call her father, whom she described as “extremely proud.”

“This is one of those things where you get your entire education for this moment,” de la Torre told WordsWorth, adding that she may have said some “bad words” because she was so excited.

The incoming Head of School said she will be doing a lot of reading, speaking with current Head of School Larry Van Meter, and talking to some of the faculty members to prepare for the July transition. de la Torre also mentioned that she will be staying connected with the school through social media and reading WordsWorth.

de la Torre was asked about different aspects of school life that she plans to bring to MFS: “I think I kind of have to live the life of MFS for a few years before I really realize what I could add or bring.” She continued that she wants to make sure she knows what the school has done in the past before she does anything new.

 

She spoke about how she builds community in her current school, Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and how she and her husband create “a huge breakfast taco bar for the teachers” the day after report card comments are due. “[The Taco Bar is] our way to sort of bring teachers together today and thank them for all their work representing our students over the weekend,” said de la Torre. She added that while comment writing can be exhausting, “it’s about helping [students] and [their] learning and development. So my job as a school leader is to support the teachers to support [the students].” The taco bar, a Texas tradition, typically has bacon, potatoes, and tacos.

The reason de la Torre chose a taco bar is because she sees food as a way that people connect with each other. “Food is a part of everything I do. I think food is the way people connect with each other; I think people enjoy cooking together; I think people love eating together. So I try to think of ways to bring food into the school,” said de la Torre. She continued that Moorestown Friends is much bigger than her current school, and she doesn’t know how much bacon she can make, noting her and her husband cooked bacon for 38 hours for the Taco Bar. Despite this, de la Torre says it will be “fun to see ways to bring the tradition into the school.”

When asked if she was planning on teaching any courses at MFS, de la Torre said, “I mean, I’d love to. Nobody’s asked me but, I…I mean…I’m going to…say yes.” At her current school, de la Torre teaches a class called Global Citizenship: “It’s a semester-long elective for tenth through twelfth graders. It’s the best part of my day.” She also teaches a class on food and culture. Regarding what class de la Torre would teach at MFS she said, “Global education is my background but I’m also very interested in global leadership, and I know that Mr. Van Meter has done a lot with leadership, and so that’s also interesting to me too. So I’d like to see what you all want and how I can help.”

 

Regarding the perk of living in the Head’s Residence on campus, de la Torre told WordsWorth that there may soon be another furry friend for MFS students to meet: “My husband’s dream was to get a dog. So, once we’re a year or so in and [have gotten] a sense of the place, maybe we can get a dog. I think Mr. Van Meter has one, so I think it’s something that is welcome.”

-Andrew Rowan, Aaron Klein, Ali Chesnick