Mrs. Oder helped me a lot when I was in a bad place and I’m thankful I had a teacher like her that I can just email and talk about how I feel.

 Jill Oder is a sixth grade social studies teacher at Elaine S. Schlather Intermediate school. She is 40 years old, and was born at Tyler, Texas. She is married with three boys and one daughter, ages 13, 9, 2, and her daughter is 1.

 Mrs. Oder didn’t always want to teach. “I wanted to be in the CIA and be a nun, those don’t go well together and since I’m not Catholic, that would also be difficult.” said Mrs. Oder. She also wanted to be “a sports medicine doctor, an event planner, and summer camp owner.” She also explained that being a sports medicine doctor takes away a ton of time away on evenings and weekends, she wants family time.

Mrs. Oder does event planning on a volunteer basis, and she does summer camp every year.  She leads music at a kids’ camp for hundreds of kids. “And maybe when I retire I can buy my own camp!” she said.

Mrs. Oder’s childhood dream was, “to grow up and have a family and own a camp or an orphanage.” She didn’t always want to teach, “I wanted to travel and write articles for National Geographic,” she also told me her ideas and goals were all over the place.

Mrs. Oder had some hard and easy times growing up. “Hard parts were getting along with my step-sister because she was mean to me just because and told me I couldn’t sing,” she explained, “which destroyed me because I loved to sing just to sing.” She also explained that there were some traumatic things that happened in her family that were out of control, that were hard for her to deal with in high school. Although there were difficult times, she enjoyed high school. She was Color Guard captain, and was an athletic trainer, a PAL, an exchange student, and in drama.

“Some easy things were school and friends. I wasn’t a great student, but I did fine.” She also said that she wasn’t that good at math and always needed a tutor, but in college, it suddenly clicked. “I didn’t have a ton of friends, but the ones I had were good friends.”  Mrs. Oder attended Georgetown High School and attended college at Southwest State University.