Yesterday, October 8, 2026, the Pasadena Unified School District hosted a major conference on the future of local education, the saving of schools from closing, addressing declining enrollment, maintaining quality instruction in the classroom with teachers and students happily engaged. I wish them all luck and will try to access the results.

Most of my teaching career has been in Pasadena. I came here in 1970. I didn’t know it at the time, but forced integration with busses delivering children to new neighborhoods provoked the famous “white flight” where families sold their homes and moved farther east. Enrollment declined, teachers were needed to fill the gaps left by those who looked for “greener pastures” (greener, as in money, because Pasadena was the lowest-paying district anywhere around), and I bought my first and only house in Altadena, and took a job teaching fifth grade at Longfellow Elementary on Washington Blvd. in upper Pasadena.

My eyes were opened. At the inservices before school started, they told us that decades ago Pasadena was known as the “Lighthouse District in the Nation.” Now, they were trying to regain status and convince people that Pasadena still “has it.”

Ten happy years at Longfellow, then a stint at Muir High School and the rest at Marshall. I saw the ups and downs, things tried, administrators replaced, target academies focused, and too much business as usual. Private schools spread like locusts, home schooling was allowed before covid, and continuity was lost in partisan irresolution.

I’ve been retired for 24 years after 40 years in the classroom. When people tried to urge me into administration, I declined, not just because I’m shy and socially awkward, but because my world was in in the classroom with the students.

I’ve always been surprised by my influence. People seem to think I know what I’m talking about. Yes, I have a Master’s Degree in English, yes, I have many publications in numerous journals and magazines and newspapers, poetry, essays, reviews, fiction. Yes, I worked too hard, got too little sleep, drank too much coffee, kept high standards which the children met, treated the students as people, friends and family and neighbors.

When they gave me high school seniors to teach, we worked at the college level. The colleges agreed, and offered scholarships.

I’ve detailed a lot of this in my blog, now reaching people in 82 countries. There’s life in me yet. Saturday I’ll be 85. People say, “You don’t look a day over 80!”

I have a lot to say, suggestions, ideas, and I’m scheming ways.

I stand by my article some forty years ago in the English Journal, “A Plea for Cooperative Continuity,” where I argue that teachers, my beloved colleagues in my beloved profession, if we work together, after twelve years with the students, passing them up and up from grade to grade, together we can “save the world from itself.”

Communication is a key. It works wonders and opens doors.

I think of some of my “career highs,” like the time when two of my students were flown to Washington D.C. (along with their teacher) (I had to pay for my wife’s airfare) to represent “The Youth of America,” and the reporters were astounded and asked, “Are you from some expensive advanced hard-to-get-into elite private school?” and my students said, “No, we’re from a regular public school in Pasadena, California,” and everyone applauded.

So, fair warning, in the worst crisis in my lifetime, I’m serving notice. We all need to do more. After 85 years, I’m working on the next 85.