The Glory Years, 1969-1976
I almost feel as though I should apologize for such lengthy personal posts, but I didn't feel (at my age) I could answer Mrdreamjeans' queries succinctly.
My career was going so well, it seems, right after completing my M.A. and returning to APS to teach. I was moved to the downtown high school, whose original building from 1910 was still standing. It predates statehood by two years. Most of the campus, primarily consisting of four buildings, occupies the corner of Central Avenue and Broadway. There are so many special things about this school. The last unified class of the city, 1949, graduated here before the opening of the second high school, Highland, which graduated its first class in 1950. The atomic bomb and three military bases in town brought a burst of sudden growth to the city. When I moved away in 1976, there were then twelve high schools.
New Mexico attracted artists of many media to its casual and scenic pastoral life. It also saw the influx of lots of persons suffering from tuberculosis because of its dry climate. I assume teachers are still required by state law to be tested annually for the disease. One spin off effect for the school is its valuable collection of original paintings by residents of the Taos art colony. Whoever it was who arranged for these large unique paintings by the Taos masters to be given to Albuquerque High School stipulated that they would belong forever to the school itself, not the district. They were hung in the library, although they had (at the request of the insurance company) been hung much higher on the wall in my years there. My favorite is "Midnight Mass at Chilili." I wonder where those priceless beautiful works of art are now since the opening of the new campus. Fortunately the buildings themselves were ultimately saved and remodeled into high-priced condominiums.
Remodeling is precisely what was done for a program in which I became a team leader in 1969. A portion of the old Manual Arts Building that had become part of the cafeteria was converted into three classrooms, a lecture hall, and a workroom for the brand new ESL program for the downtown area. It involved AHS (only sophomores) and its two feeder junior highs, Washington and Lincoln. I headed the high school portion, which included two teachers besides me. I think it accomplished a lot of good. The approach included an emphasis on transformational grammar. I'm not sure anyone even uses that term anymore. Like all educational programs dependent on federal funding, it died a quiet death after 1970.
I became a part of the regular English department for the next four years. Most of the emphasis in those last years on the old campus began to center around the plans for building a modern school near the intersection of I-25 and I-40. The street address for the new campus was Odelia Road. A contemporary GPS would have been helpful to help the uninitiated find the school parking lot. In the move lots of changes took place: some modifications to school boundaries, lots of innovative ideas in curriculum in every department, new concepts in design, etc. I'd like to see it again now many years later. The English teachers offered non-traditional courses both of nine weeks (one quarter) and one semester in length. It was almost like selling one's course to college students to get the classes to make. I volunteered to take on teaching one called Death, which explored not only themes in literature but also investigated ways societies deal with death and dying. Kubler-Ross's book, "On Death and Dying," was very popular at the time. I actually enjoyed and benefited from the class. It proved to be very popular. I wonder how long it lasted in the long run.
During this time span I met the woman I would marry. Margery was in her second year of teaching biology at AHS and lived in the same apartment complex where I moved in, in the summer of 1969. We first began car pooling and then dating. We were married the following summer. She chose to find a different job rather than simply being transferred to a different school (district policy). I still did some acting in community theater but on a smaller scale, not ALT, but other venues and also with a counseling service's program of open-ended one-acts called PLAYS for LIVING. In addition to buying our first home in the Heights near Indian School Road and Eubank, we welcomed the births of our three children: Keith in March 1972; Janet in December 1973, and Mark in June 1976.
I don't think I was truly dissatisfied with my job, but I did want a change--mostly I wanted two things: a chance to teach Spanish and a rural environment similar to what I'd known for our children to grow up in. It is true that the ESL program had ceased to exist and that the experimentation with curriculum was unpredictable.
My career was going so well, it seems, right after completing my M.A. and returning to APS to teach. I was moved to the downtown high school, whose original building from 1910 was still standing. It predates statehood by two years. Most of the campus, primarily consisting of four buildings, occupies the corner of Central Avenue and Broadway. There are so many special things about this school. The last unified class of the city, 1949, graduated here before the opening of the second high school, Highland, which graduated its first class in 1950. The atomic bomb and three military bases in town brought a burst of sudden growth to the city. When I moved away in 1976, there were then twelve high schools.
New Mexico attracted artists of many media to its casual and scenic pastoral life. It also saw the influx of lots of persons suffering from tuberculosis because of its dry climate. I assume teachers are still required by state law to be tested annually for the disease. One spin off effect for the school is its valuable collection of original paintings by residents of the Taos art colony. Whoever it was who arranged for these large unique paintings by the Taos masters to be given to Albuquerque High School stipulated that they would belong forever to the school itself, not the district. They were hung in the library, although they had (at the request of the insurance company) been hung much higher on the wall in my years there. My favorite is "Midnight Mass at Chilili." I wonder where those priceless beautiful works of art are now since the opening of the new campus. Fortunately the buildings themselves were ultimately saved and remodeled into high-priced condominiums.
Remodeling is precisely what was done for a program in which I became a team leader in 1969. A portion of the old Manual Arts Building that had become part of the cafeteria was converted into three classrooms, a lecture hall, and a workroom for the brand new ESL program for the downtown area. It involved AHS (only sophomores) and its two feeder junior highs, Washington and Lincoln. I headed the high school portion, which included two teachers besides me. I think it accomplished a lot of good. The approach included an emphasis on transformational grammar. I'm not sure anyone even uses that term anymore. Like all educational programs dependent on federal funding, it died a quiet death after 1970.
I became a part of the regular English department for the next four years. Most of the emphasis in those last years on the old campus began to center around the plans for building a modern school near the intersection of I-25 and I-40. The street address for the new campus was Odelia Road. A contemporary GPS would have been helpful to help the uninitiated find the school parking lot. In the move lots of changes took place: some modifications to school boundaries, lots of innovative ideas in curriculum in every department, new concepts in design, etc. I'd like to see it again now many years later. The English teachers offered non-traditional courses both of nine weeks (one quarter) and one semester in length. It was almost like selling one's course to college students to get the classes to make. I volunteered to take on teaching one called Death, which explored not only themes in literature but also investigated ways societies deal with death and dying. Kubler-Ross's book, "On Death and Dying," was very popular at the time. I actually enjoyed and benefited from the class. It proved to be very popular. I wonder how long it lasted in the long run.
During this time span I met the woman I would marry. Margery was in her second year of teaching biology at AHS and lived in the same apartment complex where I moved in, in the summer of 1969. We first began car pooling and then dating. We were married the following summer. She chose to find a different job rather than simply being transferred to a different school (district policy). I still did some acting in community theater but on a smaller scale, not ALT, but other venues and also with a counseling service's program of open-ended one-acts called PLAYS for LIVING. In addition to buying our first home in the Heights near Indian School Road and Eubank, we welcomed the births of our three children: Keith in March 1972; Janet in December 1973, and Mark in June 1976.
I don't think I was truly dissatisfied with my job, but I did want a change--mostly I wanted two things: a chance to teach Spanish and a rural environment similar to what I'd known for our children to grow up in. It is true that the ESL program had ceased to exist and that the experimentation with curriculum was unpredictable.