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BN: Did your prior experience in activism, Asian American Studies and so forth affect your teaching in any way, do you think?

AU: I think it did. I mean, for one thing, I was sensitive to issues of racism when I knew our kids were experiencing that, too. The students were often Latino and Black. Well, the whole mixture, I had a lot of Anglo students, too. I think that the activism did help me have a more open mind to all the kids, whatever their needs were. And I have to say, I have to admit this, though, the kids that I was the least crazy about were the really affluent, spoiled Anglo kids I had at Granada Hills High School. And I tried to do a good job with them, too, but I have to say that among the students, I found that the most obnoxious. I got along well with the gang kids, I did. Even the kid that threatened me, his gang, I remember there was a kid Michael Mares from the same gang, he and I, we got pretty close. It's just interesting, there was something about gang kids that I... I think one reason I was more open to them was I saw the reaction of a lot of the teachers toward them, and a lot of the teachers didn't want to have anything to do with them.

BN: Were most of your colleagues white? Or were there other...

AU: Primarily at that time, yeah. I remember at Grant High School, I'm thinking, I might have been the only nonwhite there for several years. And I was open to teaching the, quote/unquote, the "low kids." And our math chair was white, so he started trying to give me all low classes my entire program. Whereas department chairs are supposed to give you a balanced program, like high, medium and low classes. So I had to speak up for myself and complain because he was pigeonholing me, "Okay, Amy will teach them, so I'll give her all of them."

BN: Were you involved at all in any of the teacher organizing, teacher organizations or unions, politics, as a teacher?

AU: No. I was a UTLA member the whole time. And I participated in the strikes but not active.

BN: I mean, having taught for such a long time, what did you notice in terms of change at both the school level and among the students over time?

AU: Oh, my. Well, from an academic standpoint, the students' basic skills kept dropping and dropping. Not just in math, but their writing skills, their speaking, their English skills, it just kept dropping, which was very sad to see happening. The bureaucracy, as you know, LA Unified has a huge bureaucracy that kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So a lot of us teachers were not real happy about that situation. Other kinds of things... another thing that I noticed as a trend is a lot of parents would, they would not respect the teachers' authority in the classroom. And if there had been a discipline problem, a lot of times they would say it was the teacher's fault, "not my child," even though the child might have done something very negative. I noticed kind of a shift -- not on all parents, but in some of the parents -- and that was kind of upsetting. Didn't happen to me personally, but I saw it with other people. They'd have meetings in the principal's office, and... well, this made it even worse. The principal would sometimes side with the parent, so everybody was against that poor teacher.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.