<Begin Segment 39>

GY: It wasn't long -- it wasn't long before I was just really an important part of their lives, too. And I think my special approach to educating these kids was a sense of humor, trying to make life kind of a little, jokes and things like that. And I showed -- one of the things I did was the little trick with my finger, or do this kind of thing, among other things. [Laughs] And many years later, many, many years later, I went to a bank to make a deposit or something, and there was a young black man at the desk, the cashier's desk, I guess, where they, opening -- teller, and he looked at me, and he did this. [Laughs] And he said, "You're Mr. Yoshida, huh?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I learned how to do this in your class." He didn't say, "That's the only thing I learned," but anyway, that was so neat. That was so neat.

And some great experiences. And as the years went on in terms of my, my teaching there, I had some great experiences that were more and more -- there was a movement of blacks from this section to move, slowly, so I had more and more black kids. The number of Asian kids, more Chinese kids, Japanese kids grew. But those were nice times there. There's some respect for teachers, and their parents were quite respectful. We had great parent-teacher conferences and meetings, so forth. Very supportive of the program. So I had a nice time. I had a great time. I would say nice time. Yeah, I guess it was a great time, nice time as a teacher. And I -- a couple things that I did which I thought was rather important in terms of my life, every year the sixth-graders would have to do some kind of a program, assembly program for the kids. And one year I did a take-off on Carmen with the sixth-grade class. And instead of, of tobacco factory, in which the women in the Carmen opera worked at, the workers were working in the chewing gum factory. And instead of the toreador, the, the hero was the yo-yo champ. And I used tunes from the very popular opera's, melody from Carmen and made some lyrics up to it, and it was kind of a neat program for sixth-graders.

Another program that was really enjoyable was a, an assembly, one-hour assembly of poetry. And I just learned how to enjoy poetry, and I was able to pick poetry or poems that the kids really dug. And so the poetry program assembly for the other class had to do with poetry by Langston Hughes, St. Vincent Millay -- is that her name? Poems they wrote. And how I would stimulate their, their imaginations in poetic, creative energy by having huge photographs. For example, Life magazine was a very neat source of curriculum material. For example, I had a photograph of Louis Armstrong. "Red hot," and he's going like this, and they would write poems about hot sounds coming from the Louis Armstrong, poetry. And then also did a neat poetry segment on haiku. And that was kind of neat, too. So we made a booklet, and the children wrote the three or four haiku. And I did some revisions. I, I guess it's okay to do that. No, let's move this around kind of thing or eliminate this kind of thing. And they were very successful, and we made little stamps using linoleum, they call them linoleum prints, sort of trying to get Asian kind of things. And we'd put stamps every so often, then poetry. And that was neat. That was a good, great poem, project.

<End Segment 39> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.