What is your name and department? My name is Damani Brown and I work in the Information Services Department, but more specifically a professional development center. 

Did you work at any other school or is North your first? I worked at a couple of libraries. Before this [job], I did digital literacy teaching: Basically teaching youth and some adults in the program how to navigate the internet, and use basic tools that might be used such as Microsoft word and PowerPoint. About five or six years ago, I jumped into the math role and I’ve just been a math para for those four years, so I jumped around helping other teachers in classes. 

How would you describe the clubs you sponsor to someone unfamiliar? Right now, I’m sponsoring E-Sports and Recycling Club. The Recycling Club is awesome, because every Tuesday, we go around the school and we have teams of kids that will push bins around and put paper in there and then take the bins outside. We do that every week; it’s a cool initiative to try to get people to recycle. For E-Sports, I guess the best way to describe it is competitive video gaming. We’ve had kids who have gotten scholarships for participating in E-Sports and right now we’re 5th in the state in rocket league so we have a lot of success in this school with esports but we’re just starting. It’ll become more popular. Esports is basically a creative outlet for gamers to compete with other schools across the country and find opportunities to further careers in esports. 

Do you have any thoughts on Chat GPT?  I love it, personally, it’s like my mini assistant and I use it every day, especially if I have a question I don’t necessarily want to ask Google. For example, I’ll use it to ask “Is the tone of this email aggressive?” and that’s what I use it for. It’s not just using it so it can do your work. There are so many things that you can use it for. I like to think of it as a guiding tool for our brain. So many of us have stuff going on, and it helps get rid of some of the noise or extra information. There are also no ad’s to it so far. 

Do you have a favorite song? What is it? I would say I treat music like medicine. If I’m having a bad day I’ll listen to someone I listened to in high school named Utada Hikaru who is one of my favorite artists of all time. If I had to pick a song from her that is my favorite, it would be “Can You Keep a Secret?” 

Do you have any pets? No, not yet, but we are working on it. My fiance is allergic so we have to work around that. I wish I had a dog, but my fiance is a cat person. 

How would you describe your fashion sense? I would describe it as both Lazy Athleisure and Dean Winchester who is a character from Supernatural. 

What is a valuable thing you’d tell a new teacher? Don’t forget how it was when you were their age. Something that I recognized a lot in the classroom is that the only time anyone really asked about a kid’s day or what they did yesterday was when it was like an icebreaker versus genuinely caring. Just don’t make the classroom feel like work, make it feel like this is what we do together. 

What’s your best memory of teaching/working at North so far? It’s not something that happened in this building, but when I went to this store and I saw a student who was considered a problem, and saw his future self-talk to me, I realized that grades aren’t everything. Seeing him smile and talk about how he is doing now was one of the most important memories that I have.