The first time Catherine Dixon ’05 stepped foot in Richard Avidon’s classroom, she saw a tight circle of about six chairs. Looking around, seeing Avidon sitting in the small circle, Dixon realized there was no place for her to hide in the back of the room. She thought, “Oh shit.”
While Dixon was worried about being front and center in the classroom, her friends had different concerns: Avidon’s class was notoriously difficult, and Dixon’s friends were worried about getting a bad grade. But Dixon wasn’t thinking about grades.
“I was never a straight-A student, and I never cared to be a straight-A student,” Dixon said. “That wasn’t my mindset in school, for the better or for the worse, and so I was excited when I got placed with him for European History sophomore year. I remember just being fired up in class—just being so challenged and my mind being blown,” she said.
But when Dixon’s father passed away halfway through her sophomore year, Avidon began to keep an eye out for her in his class.
Dixon said when she did poorly on a quiz, Avidon would spend lunch reviewing the assignment with her. “He and I would sit in the hallway and go over the quiz,” Dixon said. “He was dedicated to my education and to honing my thinking.”
Avidon showed up. He showed up for his students when they lost a parent or bombed one of his famously difficult quizzes. He put his colleagues ahead of himself, was never afraid to speak his opinion and valued the relationship with his students above all else. He showed up for his school.
“GDS is never going to replace Richard,” Jacob Anbinder ’10 said. “There’s never going to be another Richard.” Anbinder said Avidon was unique because he pushed students harder than any teacher Anbinder had had before.
Avidon retired after the 2024-25 school year, ending his 37-year tenure at GDS. Head of School Russell Shaw encapsulated Avidon’s career with one word: “iconic.”
When Dixon’s junior year rolled around, she was excited to take Avidon’s AP U.S. History class. But despite their close relationship—or perhaps because of it—Dixon said Avidon strongly discouraged her from taking his class. He told her that, because she was struggling with her father’s death, she would be unable to keep up with the workload and would likely fail the class. Dixon said, looking back on it, she was grateful for Avidon’s forthrightness. Although Dixon did not take Avidon’s class junior year, she took his Constitutional Law class senior year.
“Richard believed in me despite my academic shortcomings,” Dixon said. “His belief in me and care and support of my academics allowed my confidence to grow and allowed me to excel at the University of Vermont.” Dixon said she became an educator in part because of Avidon, and she now works as an elementary school teacher in California.
Avidon came to GDS in 1988. In addition to teaching history, he served as faculty advisor for The Augur Bit and Harvard Model Congress (HMC). Avidon taught different levels of U.S. History, World History Since 1914, European History, different versions of a law class, Philosophy, Economics and English 11.
When Avidon first applied to work at GDS in 1986, he did not get the job. Previously, he attended University of Virginia Law School and worked as a clerk at a large D.C. law firm—a job he said he hated. Avidon felt like the work he did as a clerk was “meaningless.” A friend suggested he try teaching high school, so he applied to local private, co-ed schools. GDS invited Avidon to teach a history class as part of his job interview, and though he thought the class went well, the position ended up going to a more experienced candidate who had a PhD and had taught high school for years.
“I sort of thought, ‘Any guy who’d rather teach than work at a white shoe firm, I like that guy,’” history teacher Sue Ikenberry said about her first impression of Avidon.
Two years later, in June, then–high school principal Frank Leonnig called Avidon and informed him of a last-minute opening in the history department. Avidon accepted his offer, and that phone call sent him on his 37-year teaching journey.
Avidon pushed the bounds of what it means to be an educator. He taught his students the importance of free speech, then tested the limits of free speech in his own job by speaking out against the head of school or high school principal—on multiple occasions. He inspired students to become educators and left lifelong impacts on his colleagues. Avidon built a legacy.
An Unapologetic Voice
Avidon wasn’t afraid to share his opinion.
“I didn’t get along with Katie [Gibson] or Yom [Fox], and I tried,” he said. Gibson was high school principal from 2017 to 2022, followed by Fox, who was principal from 2022 to 2025. “Katie and Yom didn’t really listen to what the staff had to say.”
Both Gibson and Fox declined to comment for this story.
Avidon said staff meetings were more bureaucratic during Gibson’s and Fox’s tenures. “They [staff meetings] became top-down places,” he said. Faculty members stopped sharing their opinions at the meetings, which Avidon said was a loss since many teachers had worked at GDS longer than some administrators.
“In the old days, we would debate about something [during the staff meetings] and then one of the people who had been there for some years would just stand up and say, ‘Well, here is what I’m hearing, and here is what I think we should do,’ and it was a brilliant solution,” Avidon said.
Avidon believed in faculty input since the beginning of his tenure at GDS. Early in his career, Avidon tried to revive a staff assocation—a group of workers who discuss possible improvements to the institution where they work. Some thought he was trying to start a union. His bosses weren’t thrilled.
“There was a lot of negativity [about the association] among my department chair at the time and the head of school [former Director Gladys Stern] about the whole thing,” he said. “Somehow it was translated into ‘Richard wants to form a union.’”
After hearing of Avidon’s idea to revive the association, Stern approached Avidon, put her arm around him and said, “You know, honey, you can’t form a union without my permission.” Until 1996, the role of director was equivalent to the role of head of school.
Even though Avidon knew Stern was wrong—all he needed to form an association was a majority vote by GDS employees—Avidon said support for the association fizzled out after Stern voiced her disapproval. “I think teachers were not willing to go out there and form a union, and I understood,” Avidon said.
“Some of the reason[s] why this school didn’t want a union was they felt that this school was a family, and that staff were represented and were respected,” Avidon said. “And maybe that was the case, but I certainly think that has changed.”
In one faculty meeting, former Head of School Peter Branch proposed a salary increase that would depend on the number of years a teacher had worked at the school. The raise—which was a percentage of a teacher’s current salary instead of a set amount—would reward long-time teachers with more money because GDS pays teachers more for each additional year they work at the school.
Avidon pushed back against Branch and the proposal, even though the raise would have benefited him, because he thought it was unfair to newer teachers. “Richard was well into his career, so he was fine,” former high school principal and current science teacher C.A. Pilling said. “It had nothing to do with him.”
An Unconventional Way of Teaching
Avidon’s classes were never predictable. In one memorable lesson, Avidon burned an American flag to show the complexities of free speech. Students thought the First Amendment was necessary in a democracy, Avidon explained, but watching Avidon burn the flag felt different and uncomfortable. “That’s the flag of the country—that’s not easy,” Avidon said. “I had a couple of students who thought it was extremely painful.”
A few years before, in another effort to push the boundaries of free speech, Avidon stood on a Bible during one of his classes. “It’s easy to say people should get to say what they want,” he said. “It’s much harder to face it when it feels painful.”
Classroom discussions were central to Avidon’s teaching. “His teaching style was very engaging,” Emerson Rising ’25 said. “There was never a slideshow; it was always a discussion between Richard and his students.” Rising took Avidon’s UL U.S. History and UL Constitutional Law classes.
“The class was very interesting and different from what I had expected given [other] history classes,” senior Ambar Grewal said. “[Avidon’s] teaching style was very untraditional; it wasn’t like he had a presentation or an agenda.” Grewal said the lack of a set agenda made it difficult for her to be successful. Grewal was in Avidon’s UL U.S. History class for the first semester of her junior year before she met with Fox and Assistant Principal for Academics Khalid Bashir and switched to another teacher’s UL U.S. History class second semester.
“I think Richard is a very particular teacher in that only certain students are really able to thrive in his class,” Grewal said. She said despite meeting with Avidon multiple times, her grades in the class did not improve and were the lowest she had received in any class since freshman year.
Grewal emphasized that her experience in Avidon’s class did not diminish her respect for him, noting that she worked closely with Avidon during HMC and remained on good terms with him after switching classes. “I think he’s still a really good person; it was nothing really against him,” she said.
Avidon declined to comment on Grewal’s experience in his class.
Although Grewal struggled with Avidon’s teaching style, leading to her decision to switch out, not all of Avidon’s students felt the same way.
“He knew that every student in his class was capable of great things, and he demanded those things from his students,” Anbinder said.
Alexandra Caskin ’23 remembered a class during which Avidon saw Berret Yuffee ’21, a former student who had come back to visit after graduating from GDS, and “summoned” her into the classroom. “She word-for-word quoted one of the passages that we were assigned to write about,” Caskin said. “She had taken this class like three years before, and she still remembered it. Despite the grade anxiety, we were like, ‘Wow, the material is actually being engraved in people’s heads for a long period of time.’”
Grewal said her class began with about 11 students but dropped to seven within the first few weeks. “We had a lot of work, probably the most work I’ve ever had for [any] class at GDS,” Grewal said. She said Avidon expected students to write three paragraphs before nearly every class as “minor assessments,” a workload she found difficult to balance with her other classes.
Like Dixon, Matthew Solomon ’90 said Avidon’s care for his students went far beyond their time in the classroom. “He saved some of the pieces of writing that I had done in his class, because he showed it to me about five years ago,” Solomon said. “He had saved it for like 30 years.”
Last April, during an alumni-weekend event that celebrated Avidon’s and former Studio Arts Department Chair Michelle Cobb’s tenures, former students came together to congratulate and honor Avidon. “It was telling that alums from many different eras showed up to say, ‘This is a guy who made a huge difference for me,’” Shaw said. “They [GDS alumni] will say, ‘A formative person in my life was Richard Avidon.’”
As word of Avidon’s retirement spread, one of his former students asked roughly 80 other former students to send in their most memorable stories of Avidon. That one student then compiled those stories into a book and gifted it to Avidon.
“The thing that they really appreciated, that really stuck with me,” Avidon said, “was that they felt listened to. They felt they could have an opinion, and they weren’t just told that was wrong. One student said to me, ‘You were the first adult who made me feel like I can have opinions that mattered.’”
“Richard is not the kind of teacher who reaches into a file and pulls out last year’s lesson,” science teacher Bobby Asher said. Asher came to GDS in 1991 as a history teacher. “Everything is new. He follows the news more closely than many journalists I know and always integrates it into his classes.”
Avidon always expected his students to keep up with their work. To test his students’ knowledge of the course material, Avidon frequently gave out pop quizzes.
Every day, when Avidon walked into class with a stack of papers, his students would try to figure out if those papers were their pop quizzes.
“I think one time I brought up my stuff, I put it down and I left, and when I came back they were looking at it,” Avidon said. “They weren’t touching [the papers], but they were looking at my stuff carefully.”
One class in the late 2000s, Avidon decided to tape the quizzes under each student’s seat instead of carrying them into class as normal.
Ten to 15 minutes into class, Avidon told his students to “start the quiz.” His students looked at him with confusion—“What quiz?” they asked. Avidon then instructed his students to look under their desks.
“Those sorts of things became lore at GDS,” Anbinder said.
The Bathrooms
During his career at GDS, Avidon was particularly fixated on one topic: the school bathrooms.
After a class discussion about why women often face longer lines when waiting to use the restroom, Avidon led his class into the women’s and men’s empty bathrooms to show the differences between them. Avidon pointed out that the men’s bathrooms had more toilets than the women’s, causing longer lines in women’s restrooms.
Avidon encouraged his students to question the differences between the bathrooms. At one point, the women’s bathroom had a full-length mirror while the men’s did not. Avidon thought the full-length mirror in the women’s bathroom might mean the school encouraged women to look at themselves before leaving the bathroom. Small details, he said, revealed larger issues.
But gender inequity wasn’t the only bathroom-related issue that sparked Avidon’s interest.
For years, the urinals in the men’s bathrooms stood open without dividers between them. Avidon claimed students and teachers avoided the urinals, forcing everyone to use the one stall. “It’s a subject nobody wanted to talk about, but it was true,” Avidon said. He wrote a three-page mock-serious memo to then–high school principal Paul Levy, laying out the case for dividers. Nothing happened immediately, but a few years later, the dividers appeared.
“The building manager at the time felt that if privacy dividers went up, they would get pulled down by the students,” Avidon said. “And I didn’t understand—this is GDS. Like, they’re not animals.”
A Voice for Students
Avidon was more than a teacher. Anbinder recalled how hands-on Avidon was with his work at the Bit. “He line-edited every article that I submitted to him,” Anbinder said. “Looking back, that is an immense commitment of his time and energy, and that’s something I really do appreciate.”
Anbinder said some of the most meaningful conversations he had with Avidon when he was editor-in-chief were about his editorials. “He didn’t just line-edit them; he helped me develop my thoughts and ideas in a way that I really appreciated,” Anbinder said.
Serving as the Bit’s faculty advisor for almost 25 years, Avidon was accustomed to defending press freedom. “I was called into [former Head of School] Peter [Branch’s] office and spanked over a number of things,” Avidon said. Avidon said he was once called into Branch’s office after the Bit published a piece that referred to a multiracial student as Black. Avidon said it was a mistake and remembered that after Branch reprimanded Avidon, the Bit published a correction.
Avidon, Anbinder said, encouraged students to stick up for issues they cared about. “He absolutely supported students playing a role in that, even when it meant asking tough questions or criticizing decisions taken by administrators,” Anbinder said.
Avidon’s attention to student life also extended to areas where he believed the school fell short. Assemblies were one of them. Avidon believed that low attendance at assemblies reflected the poor programming, not the students’ laziness.
“If you have to put a gun to people’s head and make them show up,” Avidon said, “then that’s not what GDS does. If [students are] not going to them, then make the assemblies better. You should make them want to be there.”
The question of meaningful programming came up again in April 2024, when the school brought in Seeds of Peace—a group focused on teaching dialogue skills about controversial issues—to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.
Avidon said the assembly was “rather weak” because it did not meaningfully address the conflict, and all of the speakers agreed with each other. A panel of experts with opposing views, he said, would have given students and faculty a much deeper understanding of the conflict.
On the front page of the GDS website, in large, bolded letters, the school describes itself as a place “where students love to learn and learn to change the world.” Avidon questioned the pressure this tagline places on students. “You can just be a typical kid, get a pretty good education, and you go on to change the world by just doing something you like,” Avidon said. “You don’t have to be [Maryland Congressman] Jamie Raskin [’79]. You can be a good friend, partner, parent.
“I mean, look, when I started at GDS, I think tuition was $5,000,” Avidon said. “For a long time, even when I started, it was a school for government employees and journalists who could send their kids here, who could afford it.
“It’s a different world now,” he said. Tuition will increase by 4.25 percent next year, which means families with students in ninth through eleventh grade will pay $58,312 and tuition for seniors will cost $58,662.
More than a Colleague
English teacher Katherine Dunbar, who came to GDS in 1993, said her relationship with Avidon grew from many shared values. “It’s based on our mutual view of the world that things really matter,” she said. “That’s how I walk through the world. I don’t know how someone walks through the world without deep emotions, and I think I loved that in him, and I think we share it.”
When Avidon invited Dunbar to co-chaperone HMC with him, Dunbar was surprised because Avidon had asked very few people in the past to help him chaperone.
“I had never seen students as committed to an outside activity that had no rewards other than fulfillment, self-fulfillment,” Dunbar said. “Because Richard took it seriously, the kids took it seriously.” Even with a demanding schedule, Avidon made time to walk through Boston with the group, pausing to look at children’s book sculptures in the Boston Common or start snowball fights. Dunbar said those small moments moved her.
One year, when students arrived at their hotel for an HMC trip, they found their rooms unmade with beds pushed together and mattresses stacked on the floor. The hotel was using the room as furniture storage. Dunbar recalled opening the doors to what she described as “total chaos.”
Rather than reacting with frustration, Avidon stayed calm. He asked students to wait upstairs with the chaperones while he went to speak with hotel staff. The hotel compensated Avidon for the inconvenience with money, and he used that money to take the kids to the movies and buy them any snacks they wanted. Dunbar said what stood out to her was how Avidon handled the situation, recalling the phrase he used with the hotel staff: “You’ve given me an explanation but not a justification.”
Dunbar said the moment was a lesson in composure. While students laughed at the absurdity of the situation, Avidon modeled how to address something urgent “with calm.”
Outside the Classroom
During his first five years at GDS, Avidon gradually began showing up at more school events, like volleyball games, theater shows and Fata Morgana, the student-led dance company. He said going to student events changed how he viewed his students’ lives. “When I watched games, I learned my students have a life outside of the classroom,” Avidon said. Avidon remembered realizing that some students who struggled in his class had other talents they were passionate about. “They were amazing,” he said. “I realized their life is not just my class.”
On one field trip to the Supreme Court—during which Dunbar accompanied Avidon as a co-chaperone—Avidon began talking with students about the case they were going to observe. What started as a conversation with one student quickly drew the rest in.
“Kids sort of gathered around him as he was walking to hear him talk about [the case],” Dunbar said. “It was literally like passion on the move.”
During their visit, the Court announced a decision about discrimination in the workplace that students found difficult to interpret because of the unlikely combination of both conservative and liberal judges in the majority. Dunbar said Avidon helped them think through the verdict’s meaning. Rather than simply explaining the decision, Avidon prompted students to work through the implications themselves.
Avidon asked questions like, “So where do you think this [verdict] would go [in the future]?” He allowed students to build their own analysis of the case. A few days later, Dunbar noticed that the students’ conclusion closely mirrored what various news stations predicted would result from the verdict.
For Dunbar, the scene was striking. Students were fully engaged in the conversation, and Avidon was listening to them just as attentively.
And even though the students were sitting on the plaza in front of Union Station, Dunbar said it felt like “walking by his classroom.”