From teaching in Mexico, to substitute teaching, to teaching permanently here at Lane, to being the Lane Building Operations Manager, to now returning this year to teaching for the first time in six years, Mr. Bradish has done it all.

After graduating from Taylor University and getting his degree in secondary education, Bradish went straight to Oaxaca, Mexico. He taught history and Spanish to high schoolers at a K-12 school with only 50 students. He returned to the United States in 2001 and began substitute teaching at Lane, which eventually led to his becoming a U.S. History and World Studies teacher.

In 2009, the position of building operations manager opened up. The administration, knowing that Bradish had just gotten his Masters in Educational Leadership from Concordia, saw an opportunity for him to be successful and asked him to assume the position. Bradish willingly accepted.

Bradish considers himself a people person. His favorite part of building operations was that he was dealing with people all day, every day.

“I got to talk to all teachers, custodians, administrators, and so many of the students,” Bradish said.

“My main job was to make teachers’ lives easier, which I love doing.”

As the building operations manager, Bradish set up meetings, made sure students had textbooks, and provided teachers with everything they needed to run a classroom smoothly. He enjoyed having a unique administrative position.

Bradish loved his job as building operations manager, but he also loves teaching, and now after six years he is back in the classroom, teaching World Studies to freshmen.

Bradish is passionate about teaching history.

“There is nothing like seeing a student get excited about history,” Bradish said. “So many students come in not liking, or thinking they don’t like history. But by the end of the year seeing those same students be genuinely interested. Man, there’s nothing like it.”

As building operations manager, Bradish did not like the disconnect he felt with the student body. Although he interacted with so many of them every day, he did not have the same student-teacher relationship that he does with the students he teaches. He loves having 150 students and really getting to know each one of them.

Bradish is not the only staff member at Lane who has changed positions recently– former math teacher Ms. Gonzalez became one of Lane’s assistant principals in October of last year. Gonzalez has been at Lane since 2007 and in these years, like Bradish, she has covered a wide range of positions including teaching Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2/Trig, Discrete Math, and Statistics.

When Dr. Dignam announced that Lane would be hiring a new assistant principal to oversee the math department, Gonzales knew immediately she wanted the job. She applied in October and was notified that she got the position within a week. Gonzales is very pleased with her position and is happy with her accomplishments. She believes her greatest achievement as assistant principal is changing from written course registrations to online registration.

She is also extremely happy with the improvements and changes she made to the school’s website. She had always felt that Lane’s website looked more like an announcement board than a high school website, but she believes now that it is much more about the students and the school than anything else.

Although she has been able to accomplish many things as an administrator Gonzales does miss teaching. One of her favorite aspects of teaching was her relationship with the students and being able to help kids enjoy math. Gonzales had to give up sponsoring the Fillipino club after becoming assistant principal which she also misses. However, she does still get to enjoy her favorite part about teaching: seeing former students who used to hate math pursuing something math-related in college.

When she looks back on her time as a teacher and looks at herself now as an assistant principal, she feels like she has “done something right.”