They say the secret to being an outstanding teacher is to love what you teach. Students will sense that affection and perhaps come to share it. That’s exactly what happened to Omari Gordon in Santa Monica College Accounting Professor Greg Brookins’ Accounting 1 class.
"Professor Brookins ‘brainwashed’ me," says the 30-year-old Atlanta native.
Brookins has been "brainwashing" — in the best possible way — students for 25 years. The beloved accounting professor begins each semester detailing his early years in the trade.
"My experiences as an accountant were fun," Brookins says, referring to his time with Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young and Fox Entertainment and of traveling around the world on business — Caracas , Rio de Janeiro , Panama , Rome , Tokyo, and Seoul —all before he turned 30.
His professor’s enthusiasm proved contagious to Gordon, who will be transferring to Cal State Northridge as an accounting major.
Breaking the stereotype
Accounting suffers from an outdated reputation and Brookins sees it as his mission to break the stereotype. Evangelizing for the accounting profession is especially important now, when it faces a crisis due to shortages in the student pipeline.
"I really do try to make it as entertaining as it can be," Brookins says, of his teaching method.
Though stereotypes stubbornly linger in pop culture, the accountant’s role has changed dramatically in the information age. Today’s accountant is at the forefront of important business decisions, using cutting-edge digital tech to guide diverse organizations.
Two weeks into his Accounting 1 class with Brookins, Gordon knew better than to think of an accountant as someone at a desk "just doing balances and bank reconciliations."
After his epiphany, Gordon asked his professor about SMC’s accounting program. Brookins happily explained the options. Later, he connected Gordon with the California Society of CPAs, where the latter is now employed as a student recruiter.
In his DNA
Born and raised in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Brookins discovered accounting as a teenager. An aptitude test taken in 11th grade career guidance class at University High clearly pointed him in that direction. "I never looked back from there."
After graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from USC’s Leventhal School of Accounting , he went to work for Ernst & Young. Brookins says, "I actually counted votes for the preliminaries of the Golden Globes while working for Ernst & Young." A couple of years later, he moved over to Fox Inc. Internal audits took him to TV stations in major markets like New York , Dallas , Houston and Washington, DC and once he transferred to Fox’s corporate offices, began traveling around the world.
Though Brookins comes from a family of educators, it never dawned on him to try his hand at teaching until he started coaching baseball. But he found coaching Little League so satisfying that he started seriously thinking about making a career adjustment: Instead of practicing accounting, why not teach it?
"Teaching was in my DNA, I guess," he says, with a chuckle. Brookins’s career at SMC grew from an adjunct faculty job in 1999 to a full-time appointment in 2001. He is now a tenured professor.
"And here I am almost 25 years into it, and I’m still really enjoying this place," he says.
Brookins knows he could earn two or three times as much working in the private sector, but he loves everything about his current life. His wife, Charlie, is an admissions associate, film/television development consultant and entrepreneur with a faith-based health and fitness business. They live in the Windsor Hills neighborhood with their two sons, James, 16, and Jordan, 13.
He loves the diversity he encounters every day at SMC, where he routinely hears a dozen to twenty different languages being spoken in his classrooms. And Brookins got involved with the Black Collegians Umoja Community as soon as he started teaching at SMC. He and other African American and Latinx men on campus collaborated in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder to form the Men of Color Action Network. He was also a faculty lead for two cohorts of "Equity Gateway Courses," in which colleagues learn and collaborate on practices aimed at reducing equity gaps for Black and Latinx students.
He relishes the faculty service roles he plays. For 15 years, Brookins served enthusiastically on the Academic Senate. Other leadership positions include past chair of the Student Affairs Committee and 10 years helming the Honor Council. SMC was the first California community college to have an honor code, he notes with pride.
"That’s important to me, because honesty, integrity, respect, social responsibility and civility are important," he says. "I’m an accountant, after all, and we take ethics exams to become CPAs."
SMC offers an Associate in Arts Degree in Accounting and several certificates, including a CPA Track Certificate of Achievement. For more information, visit the SMC website.
Article courtesy of the SMC Public Information Office
