Ms. Nareh Manooki is the new Robotics teacher at Glendale High School. She was born in Iran and her parents moved to Germany because of the war at the time.  After a while, Ms. Manooki’s parents wanted to give her children more possibilities for future employment, so they decided to move to America.

Ms. Manooki’s hobbies included Zumba training, and she taught aerobics classes a couple times a week. She loves to draw and play the piano, and since she started a family she has had less free time to do so.

As a child in Germany, Ms. Manooki’s mother and father would try to encourage her interests in technical aspects by buying her LEGOS. They also gave her a computer and asked her to type commands to make her computer work. By doing so, it made Ms. Manooki feel like she could solve problems and try to bypass any difficulties.

While in middle school, Ms. Manooki would think that she was bad at math because of her teacher. Later on in high school, she had a teacher who would try to make her understand what it was she needed to solve. In fact, Ms. Manookis’s math teacher from high school later hired her as a tutor.

Prior to being a teacher, Ms. Manooki worked for Boeing for twelve years as an engineer, where she was part of projects such as the C-17 cargo aircraft, a number of satellites, and the 787 commercial airplane.

Currently, Ms. Manooki really likes the new environment with students at GHS. She enjoys the fact that students are more tech savvy, and it allows them to have more possibilities for advancement. She is really open-minded and would like to see what teens these days are into and what it is that they like.

Right now because she is a new teacher, all of her teaching positions are part-time jobs, but she is hoping to become a full-time teacher and have a steady position soon. She does not know where this will take her, and it’s all about the opportunities that will come to her in the future.

Other than teaching robotics at GHS, Ms. Manooki teaches Statistics, MATLAB, Programming and Problem Solving, 3D Modeling and Printing, and Engineering Graphics at GCC. This semester she is also teaching MATLAB at Pierce College, and Introduction to Engineering at GCC.

Technologically speaking, Ms. Manooki says that because of COVID-19, it has allowed our technology to progress faster and force people around the world to upgrade their tech skills. These upgrades may allow teachers to improve the education for people who are not living closeby. It can also allow people from all over the world to have better opportunities, no matter where they are.