Nick DeRosa, who joined our history department in the 2022-23 school year, is doing what he loves, both in and outside the classroom. His journey to the classroom, though, was certainly an intriguing one. After earning his B.A. in government, law, and international affairs at Lafayette College, DeRosa took his knowledge of the law into a different direction. His first full-time job was as an operations manager of a New Jersey security firm. Instead of assigning homework and grading quizzes, DeRosa was responsible for the placement of armed guards and other security personnel in five states and helped lead the special operations unit in the fields of private investigation, security penetration testing, workplace violence, financial fraud, loss prevention, and other sensitive areas.

Although this kind of work was very rewarding, DeRosa found that after three years of working on some tough cases, he yearned for the security found in schools and in books. A coaching position at Don Bosco Prep allowed him to gain some experience working with high school students, and a teaching position at Villa Victoria soon followed. He taught several different classes including US history and AP world history as well as economics. Deciding that teaching was what he wanted to do, DeRosa returned to school while teaching, and earned his M.S. in education from Saint Joseph’s University. A few years later, he arrived at Pennington, where he and his wife, Amanda are also part of our residential community.  

A running thread from Mr. DeRosa’s undergraduate college years to today has been his creative writing. In 2013, he attended a writer’s workshop at the Gettysburg Review. A guest writer, renowned short-story author Lee K. Abbott, helped DeRosa edit his writing and encouraged him to stick with it. DeRosa took his advice and recently published the novella he’d brought with him, The Lost and the Loyal. And DeRosa didn’t stop there! Based on his friends’ musings while on a college road trip, he was then inspired to write a story about the psychology of millennials. This novel, Those We Knew in Summer, debuted in 2020. And like many, DeRosa also had a Covid writing project: a piece of philosophical fiction called The Last Great Awakening. DeRosa credits some great conversations about ethics and behavioral economics that he had with former students in his economics classes as inspiration for this book.  

Now a teacher of ninth-grade world history as well as Middle East history and “Radical Change of the Post-war Era”, DeRosa says that every one of his journeys as a writer helps to make him a better teacher of both history and writing. All his books have required a great deal of research, and he relays much of this newfound knowledge to his students. And when Mr. DeRosa asks his students to proofread, he speaks from experience. He routinely writes “a chunk” of text, lets it sit, and then returns a few days later to make the necessary edits. This in turn helps him to understand the writing process that his students experience. 

Incidentally, this November, English teacher Will Burke, DeRosa, and a Pennington student entered a friendly challenge: to take part in NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month. The goal: to write 50,000 words in a month’s time, which is about 200 book pages. It’s a lofty number for all involved, but setting a group goal made it a fun undertaking.

When not working and writing, Mr. and Mrs. DeRosa can sometimes be found on campus with campus celebrity puppy Phil, who likes to fetch a ball that might be a tad larger than he is!