Meet Julia Fisher!

As part of our ongoing series Meet Our GDS Faculty and Staff, we are excited to present: Meet Julia Fisher ’09!

Read the Q&A below to learn more about Julia.

Primary Role: High School English Teacher 

Years at GDS: Nearly 18 years with GDS! How, you might ask? After graduating as a lifer in the GDS class of 2009, Julia returned as a long-term substitute teacher during the 2014-15 school year. She has been teaching full-time in the English department since 2018.

What do you love about GDS?
It's a place of curiosity, quirkiness, and friendship—a place where serious study and goofy antics unfold side by side and where there's always something big happening.

Why do you do your job?
My job consists of talking to fascinating and curious people, reading books, obsessing over questions that won't go away, working hard, and indulging side interests like running, music, and journalism. What more could anyone possibly want?

A favorite part of your job?
I love it when a student thinks something is really hard and then does it—brilliantly—anyway.

Your teaching style in three words?
Not knowing, together.

Other GDS activities or roles that community members may not know about?
Julia is the Augur Bit faculty advisor and an assistant cross country coach; she also played in the orchestra for Footloose, the 2022 spring musical.

A top hope/wish for your students and/or colleagues?
To delight in beauty, truth, and uncertainty.

Personal passions/hobbies/pastimes?
Baseball. Also walking around cities and watching movies. My pandemic hobby was learning Latin.

A few favorites…?
Beethoven 9 is the best piece of music of all time. My favorite movie is Pulp Fiction. My favorite vegetable is snow pea leaves.

A tidbit about family…? 
I was raised with a biannual family tradition called ICD, which stands for Ice Cream Dinner and is what it sounds like. You can get as much ice cream as you want, but no non–ice cream foods are allowed.

One thing about yourself your students/colleagues/others probably don't know?
For my first year and a half of college, I played trumpet in the marching band. We didn't march. But I did get to play at a football game in front of a crowd of 50,000 people.

One thing on your life "bucket list" you've already accomplished?
I became a regular at a commercial establishment, such that an employee knew my name and order. (There are other ways in which going to Pete's Pizza 3-4 times a week is not necessarily advisable.)

One thing on your life “bucket list” you have yet to accomplish?
Going to games at all 30 MLB ballparks. (I've actually been to 31, but four of them—RFK, Olympic, Veterans, and old Yankee Stadium—are now defunct; I'll hit the last three—Wrigley, Kauffman, and Globe Life Field—this summer.)

With a tip from Julia, we reached out to hear what a colleague had to say...
High School English teacher and instructional coach Katherine Dunbar said: “I couldn't be more grateful for Julia's very fine company. Few people I know are as captivated by the weighty joys of intellectual exertion as they are by the ephemeral delights of daily life—as invested in John Milton as in Juan Soto, as moved by a beautifully crafted student paper as by a perfectly placed comma (which she probably wouldn't characterize as merely an ephemeral delight, actually).  I relish the very frequent moments when the two of us look up from our desks opposite each other and realize we're feeling exactly the same love for the GDS world swirling around us. And there's also no one I have more fun disagreeing with—because few people I know listen as earnestly and eagerly to ideas that don't precisely align with their own. Now that's fine company.”