With the 2025-2026 school year underway, new teachers are settling into the PCDS Upper School. Ms. Booker, Mr. Gideon, Ms. Hott, and Ms. Shen all come from unique backgrounds, and they now bring their experience to the PCDS community. Eagle Eye News set out to get to know these new faces on campus.

Ms. Booker

Ms. Booker teaches physics in the Upper School. Her career in teaching science, specifically physics and integrated science, has taken her all over the world, from Washington D.C. to Kazakhstan to Hong Kong to Latvia. 

Before going across the globe, Ms. Booker lived in Northern California. Growing up, her father, an electrical engineer, often had a garage full of spare parts. “I just loved testing things, trying things out, and it kind of inspired me to really enjoy science,” Ms. Booker explains.

Out of all of the places she has lived, Ms. Booker especially appreciates Hong Kong for its vibrancy. She comments, “There are places in Hong Kong where it’s so dense and you cross the street and swarms of people are crossing at the same time, and you look up and it’s just skyscraper after skyscraper, and every corner is like a new scent, and you have the old-fashioned neon signs that you used to see in Vegas…It’s just a really vibrant city and it has a large expatriate community as well, so local Hong Kong Chinese people and people from all over the world go to Hong Kong to work. So it’s kind of an exciting place to live.”

Another feature about Hong Kong that Ms. Booker appreciated was the city’s active elderly community. She explains, “It was so inspiring to see people in their 70s and 80s who were still hiking every day, who were still out doing Tai Chi in the parks, who were out doing dance with their friends. It was a very social thing there, and I really enjoyed that about the culture.”

Inspired by this aspect of Hong Kong society, Ms. Booker has recently taken up volleyball. Not only has she coached at other schools, but she’s also joined an adult league. On Tuesday nights, she and her husband hit the courts. She says, “It’s a lot of fun. We both had played when we were younger, so it’s like you have the skills here, but you’re older, so your body’s different, but you still love it, right? So I really enjoy the idea of playing a team sport again.”

This school year and beyond, Ms. Booker looks forward to the Senior Trip in May and potentially starting an astronomy club on campus. 

Mr. Gideon

Ms. Gideon teaches Coding as Art I and II, now incorporating virtual reality, as well as Programming in Python and Sound Design, along with Dr. Botts, PCDS Middle and Upper School Band Director. 

As a child, Mr. Gideon was “always into gadgets,” which led him to his interest in computer science. He says, “I honestly just took a computer science course just to see what it would be like when I was in college, and I just liked it, and stuck with it.” Specifically, Mr. Gideon is interested in how the vast field of computer science intersects with other subjects, like economics, sports analytics, and making games with code.

Outside of computer science and teaching, Mr. Gideon enjoys playing golf and chess, as well as watching movies. His favorite movie, “Sicario,” is an action film about drug cartels and the battle between Mexico and the United States.

This year, Mr. Gideon looks forward to “events that bring the community together.” He also says, “I’m just excited to see where the curriculum and courses go. Like, we have this [virtual reality] course. It’d be interesting to see if this sticks for the Coding as Art II class.”

Ms. Hott

Returning to her alma mater, Ms. Hott ‘20 teaches U.S. history. “I feel very honored to start my career here because this is just the best place to teach in the state, so it’s really like a blessing,” she says.

When she was a student in the Upper School, Mr. Guthrie, who is now a substitute teacher, and Mr. Martin taught her in history. They both served as her inspiration to teach history: “They were just the greatest history teachers ever. You could just feel how excited they were to talk about the things they were discussing. And I also started to connect my own life, my own culture, my own community, to the things I was studying, and that made it feel so much more real and important.”

After graduating from PCDS, Ms. Hott went to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, for her first year of college. However, due to restrictions during the pandemic, she came back closer to home, to ASU, for a more authentic college experience. She says, “I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not, but I really did end up loving it. I just tried to join every club that remotely interested me, and it’s easier than you would think, to make a really big community feel a lot smaller. And then I did my master’s there too, because I liked it so much.”

From growing up here to attending ASU for college and her masters degree, Ms. Hott is familiar with the Phoenix area. However, she’s still open to finding interesting places to explore in parts of Phoenix that she’s never been to, from coffee shops to museums. In addition, Ms. Hott loves animals: “I’m trying to walk and play with my dog in every spare moment that I have,” she says.

Ms. Hott has a unique perspective of PCDS as an alumna now in a professional role. She says, “I’m the most excited to see what’s changed, because even though it wasn’t too long ago that I was here, it seems like such a different place to me, and all for the better.”

This year, she looks forward to getting to know her students. She says, “If they leave the class knowing something or feeling even slightly inspired, that would be everything.”

Ms. Shen

Ms. Shen is from a small city close to Shanghai, China, where she grew up, attended university, and started her career as a Mandarin teacher and journalist. 

She comes from a family of teachers. She furthers, “My grandpa was a [high school] principal, and my dad, my uncle, my aunt, all of them teachers.” Growing up in this environment, she craved change, prompting her to go to graduate school to be a journalist. She says, “I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to have a different life.”

After getting a master’s degree in Arts and Journalism and a Bachelor’s in Modern Chinese Literature, she worked as an entertainment reporter for a newspaper. Her job involved watching movies ahead of the official release during “media watching sessions,” and writing articles about them. 

After getting married to her husband, she moved to the U.S. in 2009. During the 2024-2025 school year, Ms. Shen was a substitute teacher for Mandarin classes in the Upper School for four months, and she now teaches full-time. “I really love being in the class because I know all the kids. Actually, because I was a [substitute] teacher, I sort of have a sense of the learning style and personality. So it’s very exciting to be back here,” Ms. Shen comments.

Last year as a substitute teacher, Ms. Shen was impressed by her students’ ability to read and write in Mandarin. While she sees these skills as important, she has a different goal in mind this year. After hearing students last year express a desire to improve their conversational skills in Mandarin, she says, “I’m trying to create a more speaking-friendly environment in the class.”

PCDS is lucky to welcome such a great group of new teachers this year. Their diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and experience will no doubt enrich our community.