Kathe Tanner covers the North Coast for the Tribune, my old (if brief) paper from many years ago, and she is excellent. This story made me a little sad. I’m hoping Leffingwell’s closing is a mere demographic blip, soon to be restored by a few more students who deserve a school like this.

I did. My career at AGHS was never particularly distinguished, but my GPA nosedived in 1969. There was chaos at home, including Mom’s death, and I had some excellent teachers, but I could’ve used a place like Leffingwell where there was a better chance for teachers to grow into mentors, when they weren’t surrounded by 35 teenagers in an American Government class. “Continuation School,” in the late 1960s, was pejorative, a place for knuckleheads and girls who got pregnant. (Like my friend Bonnie, who Elizabeth and I found waiting tables at Bob’s Seafood in Morro Bay many years later. I adored Bonnie in 1969; I admired her—it was the weekend just before her daughter graduated from Cal Poly—even more when Elizabeth and I met her over fish and chips.)

I later found out that Bonnie, years later, took her own life, just as my mother had in 1969.

Despite my dismal high school career, I went on to teach Advanced Placement U.S. History and Advanced Placement American Government at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo. Someone in administration must’ve lost their mind, a suspicion confirmed eleven years later when I was suspended from my teaching position for insubordination. The same kind of catastrophic lapse in judgment came fifteen years later, when they decided I should be Lucia Mar’s Teacher of the Year.

Bosh.

In Lucia Mar, at AGHS, I taught Advanced Placement European teacher, and there was at least one colleague who couldn’t resist needling me for teaching “easy” kids. (I only got the job because the previous AP teacher, a little soft on Hitler for my taste, resigned to take a higher-paying job in another high school.)

I understood my colleague, even though the little barbs she threw drew blood. I was not particularly good at teaching the “regular” kids—there isn’t a good word to describe the vast, and important, in-betweens—10th Grade World History. It took my passion for the subject and a year’s maturity (mine and theirs) to make me love teaching 11th Grade U.S. History.

But I found out something else in the interregnum. Between leaving Mission and beginning at my Alma Mater, AGHS, I taught for a year in Atascadero Unified. It was Night School. I was assigned every student who’d failed World History or U.S. History—or both—and they had to get through me to graduate high school. They were the “retreads.”

Napoleon could not begin to imagine the immensity of my power.

I also taught GED for adults (thank God for the student who helped me to teach math) and, in one of the richest experiences of my teaching life, I taught an adult how to read.

I didn’t have that much fun until, at AGHS, Mr. Goossen tapped me to teach a study hall for at-risk kids. When my class filed in the first day, I felt a quiver of fear: one of them, Jack Raymond, had a lacquered Mohawk. In technicolor. I was doomed. There was no way I could teach to a Mohawk.

The one thing I had going for me was that they were expected to begin each class by journaling. I collected them periodically, read them and commented on them. In the process, I found out f that many of my study hall charges were very bright—-some of them brighter than I–and some of them lived in directionless homes, slept on dirty sheets at night, had lost someone whom they loved, frequently a role model, and they loved the constancy of their closest friends, always music and almost as often a cat or dog.

I thought Jack was smiling at me insolently sometimes. It turned out later that he liked my sense of humor.

The honor in teaching AP students was in their drive, their curiosity, their willingness to learn the craft of writing. In teaching “retreads,” I discovered in my students the immensity of their compassion and the incredible courage it took for them just to come to school, to come to my class, every day. I certainly didn’t have that kind of courage in high school. I missed a lot of classes.

We were assigned Melville’s Moby-Dick as 11th-graders and I conveniently came down with strep. That meant that I could cover myself with blankets, stretch out on the sofa with our West Highland White Terrier, Winnie, asleep on my feet, and begin to learn more about whales than I ever wanted to know.

But I was safe. I didn’t have to go to school.

That’s when and where I learned to be a Retread.