<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Now in those earlier months, what did you do? How did you spend your time?

KG: Well, my first year, I was a senior in high school, so I was busy.

TI: And how was the school at Tule Lake compared to Sacramento?

KG: They were two extremes as far as teachers were concerned. We had several teachers who were single who taught at UC, and they were upset over what had happened, and they voluntarily took jobs teaching. And they were very considerate and outstanding. And then there were the other group of teachers who got government jobs that they taught in little schools, and this was a big paycheck, I'm sure. And they tend to be less sympathetic. I don't know if prejudiced, but they were not as understanding. It just seemed like there were two extremes in terms of caliber of teaching.

TI: Now, where did the teachers come from? You mentioned the UC teachers, so it sounds like they came from different parts of...

KG: All over.

TI: All over. How about that other group? Where did they come from? Were they more local then, or did they also come from all over?

KG: All over, I think. I can't recall where they were from, but there were a number of teachers that... I wouldn't say they were prejudiced, but they were just so-so.

TI: Now, when you think of those two groups, how did they compare in terms of the size? I mean, were there more of one versus the other?

KG: Well, those that were... the few that I had that were from UC Berkeley, actually, they were outstanding and very understanding. I had a teacher, one teacher was from Hollywood, actually. She was a single person, and had worked with all the movie stars, so she used to talk a lot about the movie people, and she was very interested in what was going on, and very, she was an outstanding teacher in terms of being aware of what was going on, and was very sympathetic. But anyway, it just was a mixture of teachers.

TI: But you could tell that some of the teachers really cared about the students.

KG: Yeah, they were very caring and understanding and concerned. And then there were some that... but that's the nature.

TI: And how about the quality of the teaching, like the instruction? I mean, you mentioned earlier you loved geometry, and how did something like mathematics, how was that taught?

KG: That was the one thing I missed, because I was scheduled to... normally I would have gone on to taking calculus, which I didn't get, it wasn't available. And some of the teachers were, there were some Nisei teachers who were college material, they didn't have enough teachers, so some of the college kids became teachers as fill-in, more or less.

TI: Oh, so there was now this third, so you had, like, you mentioned earlier, two groups, and now you had this now third group of Niseis who, older Niseis who...

KG: Yeah, some.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.