<Begin Segment 11>

MA: And did you teach in the public schools?

CQ: Yes. I first started at Compton, and then I was there for three years under Sam Zacheim, our principal. And I wanted to quit every year. I was so exhausted, and I was just tearing my hair out because these kids just had so many problems, and I felt I couldn't really help them, and they needed more help. I mean, you know, their brothers and sisters were either incarcerated or on road camp. Compton was a really rough area at that time.

MA: What was the racial, I guess, breakdown of Compton when you were there teaching, the student body?

CQ: It was probably, it probably was half black, some Asians, some Mexicans, some whites. It was changing, I taught at Walton junior high school, which is at the edge of Compton, which was all white at one time, and then it started changing to more black, more black, and people started, they called it "white flight," and they started moving out. And I had very few Asian kids, quite a few Mexicans, mostly blacks, and very few whites. And I mean, I would cut hair after school, I would listen to their stories, I would, you know, break up fights. It was exhausting work. I loved the kids, but I felt like... you know, I was pregnant, I was gonna have a baby, I had gotten married. And so I just felt I couldn't teach anymore, so I said, "I just can't teach anymore." And so I took a year off, and while I was still pregnant, I did some things on, my girlfriend was teaching in Palos Verdes, and she said, "Would you talk about Japan? I'm having this unit," blah, blah, blah. So I would go in and talk about Japan, and then I'd meet some other teachers at that school. It was an intermediate school, sixth through eighth. And they'd say, "Oh, would you do an art project for our class?" blah, blah, blah. 'Cause I wasn't teaching at that time. And so then I got to know the principal really well. He said, "You know, I'd like you to be our art teacher next year." And so I go, "Wow." And so it was a dream job.

MA: And this was at Palos Verdes High School?

CQ: No, it was at the intermediate school.

MA: Oh, I'm sorry, okay, intermediate school.

CQ: Malaga Cove Intermediate School, and then I went on to the high school. And then I became the department chair and everything was fine. And we had wonderful, wonderful students, who won all the national and local and the state awards. And they were just phenomenal, phenomenal students. And, well, the ones in Compton were phenomenal also. They were really good. The students just have that gift, to rise to the occasion, and if you encourage them enough, they produce fantastic work.

MA: During your career as a teacher, did you ever face, like, I don't know, in the public schools, did they ever cut funding, or were you fighting against budget cuts during that time? 'Cause I know now they're really cutting back on art programs...

CQ: Oh, yes, it's terrible.

MA: ...music, and even physical education.

CQ: They were trying to cut the programs at Palos Verdes High School. The Palos Verdes school district had the elementary schools, a few intermediate schools, and then they had three high schools while I was there. Miraleste High, Palos Verdes High, and... oh, two high schools, yeah, two high schools. So they were always going to cut the budget, I mean, cut classes. And so, of course, the art department and the home arts and the shop classes were the ones that were going to get the axe first. So what you had to do is you had to just fight tooth and nail, and it was a very dirty kind of fighting that we had to do because we were protecting our own programs. I was protecting my department, the theater, the music, the visual arts. And the other people were protecting their departments, and I was very, very active. I was a representative, and I would go to the board meetings and I would do a lot of presentations in front of the board of my people who had won congressional district art awards, and that meant I had three congressional district art award winners. That means that there's only one student from all the high schools in the district that gets to have their work hanging in the halls of, between the congress and the senate for a whole year. And you have to, and each high school was able to submit one art work, and then whoever judged it would pick the one they felt was the best. And so everything that my students did, every award they won, I made sure that it made the newspaper, and that somehow, the district was involved with giving an award at the same time to the student. And like I would ask for funding for the mother of the student when we went to Washington, D.C. for the awards. And so I kept, I kept ours in the news a lot, I mean, in front of the board. That's the most important thing. And so I don't feel proud of what I did, it was a necessity. But it got rid of all the shops and it got rid of all the cooking and sewing, and I kept my entire department intact.

MA: It seems like you had to. I mean, what you were saying, to keep it alive.

CQ: Yeah, I felt terrible, but I felt the theater and the music and the arts, the visual arts, drawing and painting, ceramics, the crafts, I fought so hard for that. And so they did cut the other programs, and they didn't touch mine. And I made sure that they knew that my art club was always making tons of money with their art sales and cookie sales and everything else for scholarships and things like that. And we were, our kids were really going on and becoming very viable graphic designers and commercial artists and real painters in our society. And we just had the right mix. We had people that were in the forefront in their families, you know, they came from families that would work hard and supported the arts also. I couldn't have done it alone. But we had to, I had to go into all these areas to make it work, and I felt that we had one of the strongest art departments in the area.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.