Thanksgiving Eve Traveling to Fort Collins

After we graduated from Western State College, I took a job in Monte Vista Colorado. There were only two places that offered my interviews when I graduated as a Speech and Drama major with an English minor and a Secondary teaching credential. One of them was Monte Vista Colorado. They thought that I would do since I went to a college that had the same winters as they endured. They offered me a job for 6,100 dollars a year.

We found an apartment which was a converted garage of the mother of the bookkeeper of the school district. It was priced right at 80dollars a month and that included all utilities.

Thanksgiving eve we loaded up the Chevy pickup and headed to Fort Collins. We had to travel though Alamosa, over the Le Vita pass and into Walsenburg. Walsenburg was futher south than Tinadad and Pueblo and of course Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs is over 120 miles for Fort Collins. It was quite a trip and took more than two tanks of gas and a lot of endurance. The front range driving was extremely boring. The total trip was around 400 miles.

It was particularly tough since the teaching job was not going well. I was teaching without a syllabus and teaching what I thought the students needed. They were into arguing but did not develop units of proof needed to develop their arguments to persuasion. They also wanted me to get the students to diagram sentences. I still feel that this is a total waste of time.

The students were 80% Mexican American with Indian mix. They came from very poor backgrounds. It was difficult to motivated them. They were 8th graders. The principal was out on medical for his bad back. Most of the teachers were growing hogs during the summer to make it through the year economically.

They were going to charge me with 21 counts of insubordination. We told him to improve the discipline in his class and he hasn't. We had a teacher's meeting (communicated by word of mouth down the hall) and he didn't attend.

On the day before Ash Wednesday (I still can't go through that part of the year without some pangs) I asked to be relieved of my assignment for personal reasons. I took the 500 dollars that I had contributed to my retirement account and headed for California to start in state the Speech and Language program at Cal State Stanislaus. Five years later going full time I was ready to start work for the Merced office of the Superintendent of Schools. My first job there I doubled my last income at 13,400 per year. Heather was 5 years old going to kindergarten in Turlock.

Because of the stupid charges and the lack of support from any union, I made up my mind that I would become involved to support teachers from that kind of attack. You have to be careful about how you treat employees they may become huge union activists for life.

The next year in Monte Vista was a tough one. They replaced me with a Mexican American teacher because they last a civil rights case and the students erupted around Thanksgiving and put a rock through each of the plate glass windows in the downtown area. School was suspended until they could get a grip on the reasons for the violence.