With twenty-seven years of teaching experience at Loomis Chaffee, Science Faculty Mr. Edward Pond’s name may be a familiar one, whether in the context as a Carter Hall dorm faculty, a coach to both boys and girls water polo teams, and of course, a teacher to countless physics enthusiasts. 

Throughout most of high school, Mr. Pond enjoyed math and science, especially biology thanks to a great teacher. He also won the physics student of the year award in his senior year of high school. After graduating high school, Mr. Pond continued his academic studies at Bowdoin College, where he majored in math with a minor in chemistry.

“When I went to college, I thought I was going to be in Pre-Med,” Mr. Pond said. “[But] midway through my college career, I stepped away from Pre-Med and did not have any firm ideas about what I was going to do.”

In his college math classes, he met Fritz Grobe, a professional juggler and a YouTuber who gave a TED Talk that Mr. Pond loves showing his students.

“[Fritz] was the math person. As a high schooler he was taking the same math classes as I was for a math major, and he was the smartest student there by a lot. By the time I finished college, he was just graduating from high school and finished essentially a college math major as a highschool student,” Mr. Pond said. 

When he came back five years after graduation, Mr. Pond heard that Grobe had quit mathematics to start a career at the Cirque du Soleil, eventually becoming a world-class juggler. As the smartest mathematician he has ever met, Mr. Pond found Grobe and his life’s journey to be a resounding story of courage. Grobe’s experience is one example of the multiple ways that people’s lives can take unexpected paths, much like Mr. Pond himself. 

In his physics classes, Mr. Pond often shares fascinating stories about his time in the Navy. 

“My transition to the Navy was rather coincidental. My mother got a telephone call from the recruiter about my brother, but my mother happened to ask what they had for [me]. The recruiters said that they had a nuclear power plant option, and … I ended up joining the Navy and working in a nuclear power plant,” Mr. Pond said. 

This was when the epic journey began.

“The Navy was intense,” Mr. Pond said. “The schooling was something I had not much exposure to relative to the other peers in that pipeline. Many were engineers, [but] my background was very liberal arts. It was a fascinating educational journey, and I attribute much of my teaching methods to the learning models that I was exposed to [in the Navy],” Mr. Pond said.

Throughout his time in the military, Mr. Pond got exposure to “some pretty intense stuff” in his various roles. 

“On an aircraft carrier, I was one of thirty junior officers working together in the reactor department and had exposure to a lot of responsibility and some interesting travel,” Mr. Pond said. 

After eight years, the Navy opened a door for him to teach at the United States Naval Academy. Teaching there for two years and six months, he recognized his interest in teaching. While teaching at the Naval Academy, he also attended graduate school at night, studying applied physics at Johns Hopkins University.

After teaching at the Naval Academy, Mr. Pond came to Loomis Chaffee. Currently, he teaches all blocks of CL Physics II and one block of Advanced Physics I. Here at Loomis, he loves teaching. Although he has taught the same classes, throughout his time here, he always finds something new and fun. 

For almost three decades now, Mr. Pond has always enthralled his students with the joy of physics and never fails to make his classes enjoyable and vibrant. In the CL classes, he loves problem solving while incorporating high-level math in the curriculum, which helps many students understand how abstract math concepts can solve real world problems. With topics ranging from mechanics to electricity and magnetism, Mr. Pond’s students further their fascination with the natural world, setting them up to advance the frontier of science.