Chris Odom’s first official foray into teaching was as a teaching fellow in undergraduate school, but in his view, he’s been a teacher just about all of his life.

“I am one of seven children and we’ve always been very close; as the oldest, I was always kind of a teacher: ‘Let me help you with that; let me show you how to do that,’” he reflected.

A strong student and athlete, Chris and his parents made the decision to have him transfer from an “athletic powerhouse” to an “academic powerhouse” in his tenth-grade year. He remembers it as his favorite time in high school. “It was academically the strongest high school in the state; I was surrounded by serious students who were really interesting and nice people.” Looking back, Chris relates this experience to George School; both share the same vibe in his view of inspiring curiosity and academic challenge. 

While he was interested in all of his subjects — he was awarded the English Book Award and can still recite the prologue of “The Canterbury Tales,” — his passion was in computer science and physics. He had started coding on his own in sixth grade, well before schools even had computers in classrooms. “I saw the movie ‘Tron’ and I came home and thought, “I’m never playing another video game — I’m going to code them myself.”

Because educational technology is largely based in physics, majoring in physics was a natural path for Chris in college. He went on to graduate school at Clemson University, where he focused on Atmospheric Physics and had the opportunity to work with NASA in the launching of rockets on four continents. It was a dream come true in many respects.

“It was really great,” he said, “But I just missed teaching.”

After finishing his graduate school, Chris moved back home to Mississippi to spend time with his ailing grandfather and found a job at a local high school. “I taught full time, seven courses, coached four sports, and was the IT coordinator and I loved it,” he remembered. “I learned so much about teaching.” But the pay just wasn’t enough to support their growing family, and Chris soon found himself back at Clemson, running labs, teaching and lecturing. It was a solid job and paycheck, but he hoped to return to the enthusiasm and natural curiosity of his high school students.

Then a relative suggested that he and Kathleen look at boarding schools. “Boarding school? Like Dead Poets’ Society?” Chris remembers thinking. “I don’t even own a tie; I am definitely not cut out for that kind of lifestyle.”

They soon learned that there were boarding schools of all different types. He and Kathleen began doing research and discovered George School. Entranced by the mission and the beautiful campus, they thought it might be a perfect fit — but the school wasn’t hiring.

A short time later, with a competitive offer in hand from another well-regarded boarding school in New York, Chris got an unexpected call from Scott Spence, then the Dean of Faculty. A long-tenured physics teacher was retiring, and there was a position available. Chris and Kathleen packed up the car and headed north.

They visited other schools, but none felt quite right. And then they arrived at George School.

“It was rainy and overcast,” Chris remembered. “But just as we pulled up, the sun came out, the clouds parted, and the birds began singing.” Scott met him on Red Square and suggested that they stay outside for a few minutes to observe the students.

“I’m watching the students play and interact with one another, and it was like magic,” he said. “They were playing Four Square and doing dance-offs when they couldn’t decide who won the point. Kathleen and I knew right then it was exactly what we were looking for — a place where kids were allowed to be kids but were also engaged and interesting.”

They jumped right into boarding school life; Kathleen was a stay-at-home mom at the time but juggled her home responsibilities with being a dorm parent at first, and then as a dorm head and teacher soon after. Before they knew it, their two children were George School students themselves. 

“I wouldn’t be the teacher I am today without George School for sure,” said Chris, “but the best thing George School has ever done for Kathleen’s and my family has been educating our own children, Ivy ’17 and Josie ’19.”

Chris was only the fourth physics teacher in the history of George School. He started teaching four classes: three physics and one computer science. “It was sort of a one-room schoolhouse for physics back then,” Chris said. “Now, we offer two separate courses of calculus-based AP Physics, two levels of IB (International Baccalaureate) Physics, and two levels of introductory classes. And we have grown from one to five physics teachers. I’m really proud of that.”

While teaching computer science, Chris became inspired to build a robotics program at George School. 

It took some convincing to get the administration on board at first. At the time, there were very few robotics programs even at the college level. But Chris was convinced it was the direction education was heading, and he was right. Within two years, they went from 6 to 50 students in the program. Chris wrote and published a series of three robotics textbooks that were later used by other schools, including Princeton University. 

As both the physics and robotics programs grew, however, Chris found himself hemmed in by what was then a three-term schedule. He was hungry to offer students more, but the schedule was too restrictive to increase the department's offerings. The George School Academic Program, with its unique seven-term schedule, solved that problem.

“The brain science behind this program is really solid,” he said. “If you learn something, have a little bit of time to forget it, and then bring it back, it moves from the frontal lobe of the brain to the rear lobe, which is where long-term memory is stored.”

Now, he has the opportunity to teach a wide variety of courses. “I teach electronics, astronomy, even a scuba course,” he gushed. “And the travel coursework — it’s amazing what we can do.”

This past fall, Chris collaborated with colleagues Edna Valdepeñas from the English department and Polly Lodge from the Science department and took students to Bonaire to study reef ecology and the human relationship to the sea. In the two weeks leading up to the trip, he trained all of the students to become open water certified scuba divers at the pool on campus and then in the waters of the Caribbean. They spent two weeks diving off the coast of Bonaire, exploring the ecosystem, learning about the essential work of rebuilding the reef, and experiencing the culture of the island.

It’s clear that Chris is as enthusiastic about teaching George School students today as he was all those years ago when he first encountered them on Red Square. 

“George School students here have an openness to learning that is very exciting to me as a teacher,” Chris shared. “The informality of our culture, the mutual respect grounded in our use of first names — these practices remove a lot of hesitation a student may have to talk and work with a teacher in open and real ways,” he explained.

“Just the other day, we had a huge discussion in my AP Physics class about right-handed threaded screws and the physics behind them. The students were struggling to understand the concept, which resulted in this lively discussion. A student sitting in the back of class suddenly said, ‘Whoa, that’s so cool!’ about something we were talking about. These things don’t happen everywhere, but they happen regularly at George School.”