Amanda Brown is our new foreign language teacher here at GEHS. She is located in room 810 upstairs.
Brown came from Nebraska getting her Bachelor’s in Lincoln and Master’s in Omaha.
“So I am from Lincoln, Nebraska. I graduated from an arts and humanities focus program in Lincoln Nebraska so it’s like a special school just for arts and humanities, and then I went to the University of Nebraska and I got my master’s,” Brown said.
Brown has been teaching for over a decade now and before coming here she taught at some schools in Nebraska and then McLouth in Kansas.
“I’ve been teaching since 2009 and I taught at a couple of schools in Nebraska in the Omaha area, and then in Kansas, I taught at McLouth for five years and now I’m here at Gardner,” said Brown.
When she saw Gardner Edgerton High School she instantly liked the size as it was right in the middle of her past schools.
“I liked the size, I liked that it’s kind of in between because I taught at Omaha Public Schools which was a district of over 50,000 students and then I was at McLouth which was 500 students PreK through 12 in one building,” Brown said. “This is a nice in-between size and it’s not chaotic. It’s a small foreign language department, but I do have a department so it’s not me all by myself which I like.”
Once Brown became a middle schooler she was in a Spanish class and was very passionate about it.
“I loved Spanish from when I started taking it in middle school, I just really fell in love with it,” Brown said. “In college, I got to go to Spain and I had a lot of professors from Spanish-speaking countries and that got me more excited about it.”
Spanish is really important to Brown and should be important to others too because of all of the knowledge you learn and extra ways to communicate.
“There are a million reasons why, it’s good for your brain, it helps you do better in your other subject areas, it helps you do better with English, math, and everything just because of the neurological pathways it opens up, but even more important than that the ability to communicate since its the second most spoken language spoken here in the United States, so it allows you to communicate with more people,” said Brown. “It’s fun, obviously, I’m biased there, but I just think it’s really fun and it allows you to have more travel opportunities as well if you speak another language. I could go on but those are some of the main reasons.”
With it only being the first month of school nothing big yet has happened, but Brown is looking forward to a new club starting soon.
“The first month has been great,” Brown said. “I feel really welcomed by everyone that I have interacted with in my department and all the other staff that I have gotten to meet everyone’s been great. I am looking forward to starting up a Spanish club soon.”
