After a two-year trip to Rome, Italy, Middle School math teacher and co-founder of the AC 8 math program Gary Brown has come back to Westminster with a variety of new experiences. 

After a hastily-made decision when his daughter became interested in spending her last high school years abroad, Brown and his family moved to Rome, where he taught at the American Overseas School of Rome for two years. While there, the school benefited from Brown’s leadership in the high and middle school math team programs which he successfully helped enter into competitions. “[Something I enjoyed] was working with the math team at both the middle school and high school,” he says. ”They hadn’t done competitions in a couple of years because of COVID, so I kind of took charge of that and connected with some other teachers in Rome for middle and high school competitions.”

Instead of packed teaching schedules and other busy work, Brown and his family found themselves with much more free time to explore and try new things than they had in the US. “[I loved] the time we had; we weren’t at home (we didn’t own a home), we didn’t have projects to work on, and we didn’t have any family birthday parties to go to, so when Friday came we were just free.” Brown’s positive experiences in Italy even inspired him to found the new ‘It’s Pickleball, Y’all” MayATL class. “We bought a [pickleball] net and we played nearly four days a week for two years,” he says. “The whole two years we never missed a day; we’d be out there in the rain sometimes, so we all got pretty good at pickleball.”

A quirk of moving to Italy that Brown was unprepared for was the turtle-paced check-ins. “In terms of living abroad, paperwork and bureaucracy in Italy was pretty interesting,” he says. “It was almost like stepping back into the sixties.” Nonetheless, Brown enjoyed Italy, particularly the non-processed food he was used to in the US. “Everything was fresh, everything was local, and they didnt have things out of season,” he says. “We miss the non-processed food. It was the best.”

One of the main reasons that caused Brown to return from Rome was how he and his family would be burdened by taxes. “You pay a few taxes the first two years when you’re on a Visa, but the fourth year they really [increase the taxes], so we would have made a lot less money and wouldn’t afford to nor want to stay.” He was glad to return to the monthly in-person meetings of a couples book club that he and his wife had been in for twenty years as well as getting to see many of his close friends again. 

Now that he has returned to teach on the Westminster campus, Brown has come back with a new outlook on the importance and rush for students looking at colleges. “I think sometimes at Westminster there are all of these options [for colleges] and we kind of just go ‘no, I have to get one of these 4 schools or my whole life is over’,” he says.”I think that was really helpful to see that there are just some really successful people that go to school in the Netherlands for university. It was just neat to be exposed and get a little broader approach to that in life.”