About Me

Easiest contact: email me at veddere@oes.edu

If you're new to Oregon Episcopal School, new to meeting me, or just new to this site, I'm Ethan Vedder. I am a teacher at Oregon Episcopal School, and I teach the full-year science course as well as a technology rotation course. I've also taught earth science, chemistry, oceanography, ecology, astronomy in the past in high schools in Somerville, MA and San Francisco, CA. This is my fourth year teaching at OES.

I graduated from Yorktown High School (NY) in 2003, Cornell in 2007, and I got my Master's degree at Tufts in 2008. I grew up playing lacrosse from an early age, and it's helped to shape part of my life. I did well enough to be recruited by several colleges and chose Cornell, and my experiences there with the people there are still helping me develop as a teacher and as a person. Lacrosse, as a sport that is meant for enjoyment of those who play it and those who watch it, has taught me about endurance, practice, dedication, commitment, composure, responsibility, maturity, reaction to setbacks, being gracious in victory as well as in defeat, and in helping to find out about myself as a person. My college experiences with lacrosse greatly affected who I am today, and we also did well as a team, making it to the NCAA semifinals in Raven's Stadium on Memorial Day weekend in 2007. Over 50,000 fans cheered on that day. More recently I played 5 partial seasons between 2010 and 2015 with the Denver Outlaws and with the Boston Cannons, professional lacrosse teams in the MLL, and I played one season of semi-pro indoor lacrosse with the Boston Rockhoppers, part of the now defunct NALL.

I've been blessed to have a family that does interesting things, and it starts off with my parents' careers. Both of them are international conservationists, and so they've been blessed to travel to many different parts of the world for work purposes. This started before I was born, and although I was born in the US, at three months old I traveled with my family (my older brother, Noah, too) to Rwanda so my parents could study and work to help the mountain gorillas living there. I lived there until almost three years old, and then we came back to the United States and started our lives in Yorktown, NY. I had heard many stories of my time there, but since I was so young I could only imagine the experience, even though some of these stories involved me. I traveled to Kenya and Tanzania when I was 8, and then I got to see the mountain gorillas for the first time when I was 18, in the summer after I had just graduated from high school and my brother had just graduated from college. I've been back two more times to see the gorillas, in December of 2007 and in the summer of 2015. I've also been to Botswana and seen wild dogs, elephants, and many other creatures. These experiences have been truly amazing, and I hope to share some of them with my students both when they relate to topics in my courses, but also outside of class time when talking about life experiences and being immersed in new cultures. If you have any questions, ask me in class or use veddere@oes.edu to send me an email. Go be awesome.

-Mr. Vedder