Freshman Dean Brocker started school at La Salle after going to Franciscan Montessori Earth School since he was three. He chose La Salle partially to follow in the footsteps of his older sister, junior Avari Brocker, but also because of the community he saw when he shadowed at the school. “I thought I could make a lot of easy friends here,” he said, and he believes that this has held true. “Everyone was really nice.”

Brocker enjoys writing, with one of his favorite classes being English, taught by English teacher Mr. Christopher Krantz. He is thinking about joining the Creative Writing Club next year.

While he is still uncertain about his future, Brocker is considering a path in either writing or another artistic field. “I really love being creative,” he said. “I get to make stuff up.”

Another one of Brocker’s favorite classes is French. He likes the class because the teacher, Ms. Amanda Barker, has her students play a lot of games to give them practice with the language. He also appreciates how he doesn’t have to spend a majority of the class taking notes. “When we take notes they’re not usually very long, and we don’t take a lot of them,” Brocker said.

In the future, he hopes to travel to France on a La-Salle-sponsored trip. France is the country he wants to visit the most, and he’s excited to go to Paris to see the city and the Eiffel Tower.

Brocker appreciates how the teachers at La Salle are very willing to help their students. “At my old school, the teachers were really nice and they helped you with whatever,” he said. “Here it’s the same.”

Outside of school, Brocker enjoys a variety of different activities, including playing video games, reading, writing, and walking his dog. Brocker also plays on La Salle’s boys volleyball team, finding a lot of enjoyment from it because of his friends on the team.

Brocker doesn’t have any specific role model he looks up to — instead, he finds inspiration for who he wants to be from a variety of traits in different people. “A lot of people inspire me to do certain things,” he said. “I’ll watch comedy and I’ll be like ‘I want to be funny like that.’” While reading Romeo and Juliet for his English class, he found inspiration for his own writing in Shakespeare’s work.

Brocker doesn’t travel much, and has lived in Oregon all his life, but he takes a yearly trip to Wallowa Lake with his family. He also visits somewhere in the world every year for Christmas, with last year’s destination being Hawai’i.

“It’s probably my favorite place I’ve ever been,” Brocker said. When he went to Hawaii, he realized how much cleaner the air feels there compared to Oregon. “You come here and you’re like, ‘oh, what a lovely bit of fresh air,’” he said. “Then you go to Hawai’i and, wow, you never want to go back.”

Brocker describes his music taste as “sporadic,” as he doesn’t have any specific genre that he likes. “If it’s music, I like it,” he said. “Except for country music.”

Brocker said his goals for the rest of his time at La Salle are to get good grades, write good essays, and, by being a student ambassador next year, “get a bunch of people to come [to La Salle].”