Wes is an AGHS grad, a saxophonist, who played in concert with Booker T. last night (“Green Onions” is below.)

Sandy is an Army officer I hope to see again in the next few days. He taught history at West Point and has forgotten more about the Revolutionary War than I will ever know. He took his underclassmen to battlefields now 250 years old.

Two former students are military doctors. One more is an officer in the 82nd Airborne.

Two more have just become mothers for the second time, and you can tell from their photos how devoted they are to their children.

I’ve a former AGHS student, a young woman, who’s an architect. Another, a lawyer, is a product of UC Berkeley. Yet another, just married, worked with sea mammals at an aquarium.

Another just got her veterinary degree from my Alma Mater, the University of Missouri. When our tortoise, Lucy, got sick, she was a vet tech, and she cared for Lucy, who got better, with great compassion.

Another commanded a Coast Guard cutter based out of Ketchikan. When she served in Florida, she led armed boarding parties interdicting Colombian cocaine.

One is traveling in Turkey, one more in France. Another loves fishing, and she posts photos of immense rockfish she’s caught off our coast.

One–one of the most brilliant students I’ve ever taught–is a voracious reader and she works at City Lights in San Francisco, the bookstore haunt of Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and Ginsberg.

A young man, a former nationally-ranked Irish step dancer, is now a composer with a PhD from Columbia who lives in London. He is a newlywed. She is lovely.

One of his closest friends from AGHS was the Valedictorian at Yale a few years ago. He and his friend, another AGHS grad, and an honors grad from Reed College, write and perform plays.

At least three have written books.

A young woman especially dear to me is fighting, with great dignity, an autoimmune disease that would reduce the rest of us, including me, to tears.

So is a young man we taught at AGHS.

There are others fighting alcoholism, depression, or cancer. I admire them without reservation.

I admire, too, the students are now teachers, including at least one at Branch and another at Harloe and two at Mesa Middle School. And, yes, several teach history. One, a PhD with a specialty in the history of California farm labor, a topic dear to me, teaches at Poly.

This year, one student her M.D. from Harvard. Another got his from Yale.

There are students I remember vividly from Arroyo Grande High School who are therapists, police officers, mechanics, carpenters, electricians, Melodrama actors, businesswomen, farmers.

I recently posted, on another website, how important teaching was to me. I wrote about a young woman, whose parents came from Guerrero, in central Mexico, and how hard she worked to excel in our AP program at AGHS.

One reply was a laughing emoji, from a stunted man who believes in pretty much nothing.

He sees public education–where I tried, always, to teach the truth, no matter how painful it was to me– as “indoctrination.”

If he thinks I “indoctrinated” students like the ones I’ve mentioned here, then I am guilty. So are all the teachers I had the honor to know at Arroyo Grande High School.