People

You’ve most likely seen Dr. Juan Recondo in the hall or in front of your classroom, but if you know him at all, you know he’s got a passion for movies. When asked about his favorite movie, he responded, “Do you know how difficult this is, Paige?” He wasn’t wrong. I should have known that would be an impossible question for him to answer; however, there are particular films he loves, such as Seven Samurai, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Wind Rises.

Not only is Dr. Recondo passionate about movies, but he has taken his passion and made it into something more. He became a movie critic. But how did he get his love of movies?  He said, “My mother was really passionate about them.” His mother would take him to movies all the time. He then started to get into filmmaking. As he got older, his friend group was all cinephiles, and they would always go to the movies, then go out for coffee after to discuss the movie they watched. Getting inspired by all their talks about these movies, he wrote his first movie review in 2001. 

Dr. Recondo actually studied many things. He graduated with a B.A. in American and British Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, and then his master's was in Caribbean Literature (also from the University of Puerto Rico). He then got his PhD in Cinema Studies and Theatre at City University of New York. 

Interestingly enough, Dr. Recondo stopped reviewing in 2003 when he started applying for his PhD. This was not the end of reviewing movies for Dr. Recondo, however. In 2017, Dr. Recondo was contacted by an editor of the film column in a newspaper who also happened to be his professor in Puerto Rico. After this, Dr. Recondo started reviewing again, and, according to him, “We became good friends.”

Dr. Recondo likes being a movie critic because of “the opportunity to talk about movies. When people start talking about movies, I get sidetracked.” Dr. Recondo emphasized the fact that he loves talking about the movies he has watched and the experience they gave him. 

Not only is Dr. Recondo a movie critic and Spanish teacher, but he has also done lots of other things. He was actually a high school teacher in Puerto Rico, where he taught English in terms of the language and also taught English as a second language. He then moved to New York in 2004, where he taught cinema studies and theatre at NYU and City University of New York. Dr. Recondo said that while there are similarities between the United States and Puerto Rico, there are also lots of differences. For example, in Puerto Rico, they show more affection than in the United States, so it was hard for him to navigate that here.

Now here’s the question we all want to know the answer to. Is Dr. Recondo going to be involved in film at St. Andrews? He said, “I definitely would love to!” and as of now he has finally started a film club. In this film club they will watch movies together and separately and talk about them. The new film club will be for students who are passionate about films, just like Dr. Recondo.

If you ever want to start reviewing movies and become a movie critic like Dr. Recondo, here are some words of wisdom from him: “Publish anywhere, start publishing, start developing a voice.”

As a physics and biology teacher with a lifelong fascination for science, Mr. Quinlin Sandefer approaches teaching not just as a transfer of information, but as a way for students to learn more about themselves and the world around them. For Mr. Sandefer, teaching is far more than just a profession: it’s a passion.

Growing up in Texas, Mr. Sandefer played the oboe, English horn, piano, and mellophone, and was a member of his high school band. He's had an interest in the sciences “ever since I can remember,” he said, but wasn't truly sold until his junior year of high school. “Growing up, I would go through different phases of what I was interested in. It started as an astronomy phase, and then it went into geology, and there was a paleontology phase. And then it kind of just circled back into astrophysics and stayed there.” During his junior year, Mr. Sandefer learned about the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After this, Mr. Sandefer knew that it was “exactly what I want my future career to be,” he told me.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Sandefer attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he got his Bachelor's of Science in Physics, Chemistry, and Psychology. He slowly began his teaching career by working as a teaching assistant in college freshman and sophomore classes, but it didn't fully take shape until one day during the COVID-19 pandemic. During his time as a UT teaching assistant, Mr. Sandefer held office hours where students could come in with questions. However, when the pandemic hit and no one showed up, he found himself resorting to a popular outlet at the time: TikTok. “I created a series where it was, like, “Nobody's in my office hours,” where I get to talk about whatever I want to.” For hours, Mr. Sandefer would discuss complex science ideas–hoping to engage anyone listening. During his final year at the university, Mr. Sandefer studied  the detection of dark matter for his senior thesis, focusing on a theorized particle called axion. The particle interacts with the gravity field by creating ripple-like excitations but has never been experimentally confirmed. Because axions are so small and nearly impossible to detect, Mr. Sandefer designed a theoretical MRI machine to observe them. Although his project never received funding, “It would have worked if I'd been able to get it,” he said.

After graduating from UT in 2023, Mr. Sandefer began his teaching here at St. Andrew’s. He currently teaches Freshman Biology and Sophomore Physics, and these subjects, he tells me, offer us far more than we realize. “It really shapes how you see the world. It’s good at just teaching you to ask why things are the way they are like, how they got to be like that?” He said. One moment in his teaching career that reminded him why he chose this job was this: “Going to the musical and seeing everybody there in a completely different element thriving was awesome. I had almost a sense of pride. I was like, “Okay, this is a cool full circle why I became a teacher moment.'"

Outside of the classroom, however, is a Mr. Sandefer that his students may be less familiar with. He enjoys going to concerts, sewing, making his own clothes, gardening, baking, and producing his own music. His favorite science phenomenon is Rayleigh scattering, which is why the sky is blue, and if he could have any job in the world it would be this: “Physics research with teaching, so I would be able to conduct my own projects while still teaching it as well,” he said.  And, if he could be a part of any scientific study, he told me, it would be cosmology: the study of the nature of the universe. “I'd love to get into cosmology, where they're looking at all the data coming from James Webb and all of the other Hubble telescopes. They're using that to essentially map out the universe and figure out what properties it has. It honestly reminds me of, like, what the explorers were doing,” he said.

If Mr. Sandefer could give one piece of advice to his younger self it would be this: “Grades aren't as important as you feel like they are. They don't define you as a human being. You're going to look back in ten years and you're not going to remember what grade you got in a class,” he said. Now, a word of advice to his students is this: “Ask yourself why you're doing things. Both from a self perspective, like, Why did I just do that? And what does it indicate about me as a human being?” He said. “Kind of teaching you to be more in tune to your surroundings.”