Brynn Gibson
Editor in Chief
After a long and impressive career, including 14 years and two months teaching at LGHS, beloved history and economics teacher Erol Ceran has decided to lay down his Cats Flag for good, retiring to an exciting life of travel and exploration.
Rumblings about the infamous Mr. Ceran have circulated around campus for years. While his 48-page final exam may be nothing more than an urban legend, the fascinating life story of this rockstar economics teacher is no tall tale. Originally hailing from New Jersey, Ceran graduated as valedictorian of Monmouth Regional High School in 1977. He noted that his graduation speech began with, “We are tomorrow’s pioneers,” and as soon as he said it, “there was the loudest thunderclap and the biggest lightning you’ve ever seen. People literally started screaming and ran for the gym. I never said another sentence.” Sent forth with an omen indicating his thunderous ability to command the attention of senioritis-plagued students, Ceran went on to play football at Harvard University and graduated in 1981 with a degree in Economics.
While it’s hard to believe now, Ceran never intended to enter the teaching field. In fact, he spent decades of his postgraduate years working in the stock market. After receiving his bachelors, he took a job as an analyst for salesmen and traders at Merrill Lynch. Upon realizing the trading business was much more lucrative, Ceran begged his boss to give him a chance: “I took like 3,000 dollars and in… something less than 90 days I made a million dollars… So I took the record, printed it out, walked in, and put it on his desk. [My boss] said, ‘Dude, if this is real, and you can actually do this, you should go to the New York Stock Exchange, just do it for yourself.’ I shook his hand and went that very same day.”
Following the 1987 stock market crash, Ceran followed his now wife to Chicago. He received his Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance from the University of Chicago in 1991. Over the next two decades, as his wife gained respect as a business and economic powerhouse, he followed her to the Netherlands, back to Chicago, to Dublin, and finally settled in San Jose, all while successfully working as an independent trader.
While remodeling his Los Gatos home in 2004, Ceran’s family moved into a rental house conveniently located across the street from the residence of Alex Shultz, former LGHS biology teacher and current Los Gatos Town Council Board member. However, it was not until the middle of the financial crisis in 2008 –– while attending a party at Shultz’s house for his daughter’s coronation dance –– did the idea of teaching occur to Ceran: “So I’m just sitting in the corner… chatting with somebody… and I start getting animated and telling them what was happening in the economy… And before I know it I realized that there were probably 20 adults gathered around me. They wanted hear what I was saying because they’re all losing their money, they’re all having their homes foreclosed.” Ceran’s affinity for explaining complex situations with ease caught the attention of Shultz, “[Shultz] told me, ‘Do you realize what you just did?… You had them eating out of your hand; they were riveted. Some of those people literally would argue with every sentence that somebody else would say, and they didn’t question you once.’” Shortly after this “Cerant”, Shultz asked Ceran to substitute for an economics teacher at LGHS who was going on maternity leave. Those two months changed the course of Cernans’s career. “I literally became a full time teacher within two and a half months of setting foot in the high school,” explaining how he earned his teaching credential in the few months before returning as a full-time teacher at the start of the next school year.
While fully qualified to teach an AP Economics class, LGHS’s administration wanted to give Ceran the liberty to develop his own curriculum. Although his Honors Economics class has been his bread and butter during his years at LGHS, Ceran has also taught multiple history classes, including AP European History this year. While Ceran has countless fond memories of student interactions and Fractured Follies’ performances, one of his funniest teaching memories comes from a typo on an AP history essay: “I’ll never forget. One student chose to write about Pearl Harbor. He writes his beautiful essay…and the final sentence was ‘and that’s why Dec. 7 will forever live on as the date of infancy!’ He said infancy instead of infamy.”
Ceran’s decision to retire was partially influenced by his wife who retired from a very successful economics career two years ago. Reflecting upon multiple personal losses throughout his life, Ceran decided that there was no point in delaying retirement: “My wife and I were just looking at each other going, what are we waiting for? We’ve worked so hard all of our lives and we’ve achieved so much…Are we going to wait until we’re too old to actually enjoy it?”
In retirement, Ceran looks forward to traveling the world with his wife, hopefully spending time living in Barcelona, Paris, or Montenegro. However, Ceran admitted he will truly miss his work as a teacher, “Coming to school and being with young people is like plugging into a battery charger. It just fires me up; I don’t need to drink gallons of coffee. I come and just being here with you guys makes me float in midair.”
While we will miss Ceranimal’s eccentric teaching style and infinite economic wisdom, the profound impact that “Uncle Erol” has had on LGHS and its students will live on for decades to come. He sent his students off with one last piece of advice, “I used to have these deep philosophical discussions with my brother. He was always worried about becoming who he was supposed to be. The thing is, you can’t be anyone else except who you’re supposed to be. You just do you and don’t worry about knowing what the path is.”
“I created what was essentially three AP economics classes in one semester,” he detailed, “At the end of the first semester I gave a final exam that was 28 pages, and no student finished it.” While
There have been funny moments since the beginning of the first year that I taught history. I’ll never forget. The final exam had an essay. You had a choice of a couple of different things but one student chose to write about Pearl Harbor. And he writes his beautiful essay all about, you know, the surprise attack and and the response of America and how it drusen like all this did get really truly like top notch. But then at the end, he the end the final sentence was and that’s why December 7, you will forever live as the date of infancy. Infancy instead of infamy.
coming to school and being with young people is like plugging into like a battery charger. Like it really it just fires me up like I don’t need to drink gallons of coffee. You know, I come and just being here with you guys makes me like float in midair.
While he is off to better and brighter things, the profond impact that “Uncle Erol” has had on LGHS and its tsudents will live on for decades to come.
There have been funny moments since the beginning of the first year that I taught history. I’ll never forget. The final exam had an essay. You had a choice of a couple of different things but one student chose to write about Pearl Harbor. And he writes his beautiful essay all about, you know, the surprise attack and and the response of America and how it drusen like all this did get really truly like top notch. But then at the end, he the end the final sentence was and that’s why December 7, you will forever live as the date of infancy. Infancy instead of infamy.
Okay, so this is like 2004 I think. So she was in third, I think because it was Dave’s away. As it turns out. It wasn’t even that late with Dave’s away where they bust them over to the rebuilding the split. The younger daughter’s 25. Yeah. And I’m not sure if I have all these details exactly. What happened we had to rent a house. The only house available in Los Gatos at the time was on Littlefield Lane across the street from Alec Schultz. I am now and honors biology teacher and now a member of the school board. So I live across the street from his house in what is now a mansion but was then just a literal tear me down hokey Chun but you know, in all humility that we just needed the place immediately. And okay, so I build the house but become friends with Mr. Schultz. And and here’s how it happened. So now it’s like, I think, the fall 2008. And so we’re almost completed with our house. But it’s also based my econ students know that that is the middle of the financial crisis. So the Schultz is invite my daughter over my older daughter, who’s now at least got his high school to the poro pre Koro taking pictures, you know, everybody gets Yeah, they all they all need and the parents and everybody anyway, so he throws this big thing. And I don’t know anybody, right? So I’m just sitting in the corner, you know, probably having a beer, Coca Cola or something, and start chatting with somebody, you know, a parent or a teacher, I forget. But I start getting animated and telling them you’re explaining what was happening in the economy in the financial markets. And before I know it before I look up and you guys have experienced the ceramics, right, so you know, so I got into one of those right? And before I realized that, there were probably 20 adults gathered in like three rings. The meaning is to hear what I was saying, because they’re all losing their money. They’re all having their homes foreclosed. They’re all like, you know, yeah, their mortgages their, you know, their stock portfolios, right. And here, I’m just spewing all my my suppose it knowledge, right. It turned out that it was it was all very timely and pretty accurate. All the stuff I was saying, you know, saying what would happen next, and it’s not nearly over this isn’t October, Lehman Brothers had just happened and I’m saying we’re not even close to this being done. You know, it’s 30 or 40%. Lower in the s&p, and a lot of painful foreclosures later it finally bottomed in March of 2009. But anyway, after, after the party I stayed late because I lived across the street. I stayed late to help them clean up. And Alex said, he came over to me while we’re clean, and he said, he said do Do you realize what you did? And I was like, oh, gosh, I said I’m do I need to apologize. I’m so sorry, what? And he said no, no he said, those were leaders of industry. Those are teachers. He said these weren’t like CFOs and CEOs in Silicon Valley. He said, You they were you had an eating out of your head like, like they were riveted like some of those people literally would argue with every sentence that somebody else would say, and they didn’t question you once.
Moving with her, Ceran began to work on the floor of the Ampsterdam Stock exchange where he got his first taste of teaching
And as soon as I feel like I’ve really got it sorted out, right, yeah. She says, Oh, guess what? It’s time to go home. You know, our expat deal is over, and she gets recruited by another company.
He moved from– to — to —-. It was only after his wife Jennifer Ceran received a job oppurtunoity in San Jose, Ceran did
we are tomorrow’s pioneers. That’s the theme they gave me and as soon as I said it, the loudest thunderclap and the biggest lightning you’ve ever seen. And people literally started screaming and ran for the gym. I never said another sentence.
A teacher whose lessons include watching World Cup games to better comprehend global relations and ivestigating the economy at Icing on the Cake downtown.
After 14 years and two months teching at LGHS, beloved economics tecaher Erol Ceran has decided to lay down his Cats Flag for good, retiring to an exciting life of travel and exploration.
He will continue to influence the lives of high school seniors from beyond the classroom, probably by driving up the housing market via purchasing twelve properties in each american city.
His decision to retire was partially influenced by his wife, Jennifer Ceran, who retired from a very successful economics career two years ago. After
Just so we have the little we have the thing. Okay, we might need to place the is it okay? Yeah, I asked questions.
Interviewing concern, sir Shern is some sort of giant computer near. Yeah. It’s like the, you know, they have this particle accelerator and so there’s an equivalent of that in Europe. It’s called CERN.
Alright, right. Is it recording? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I guess closer. I’ll put it near you just because that would be too loud.
Yeah, that’s we want to make sure we can call them out. Right. Oh, yeah. I was funny. Well, I tried to do it. I thought firmly but yeah, necessary. Yeah, for sure. All right. Oh, yeah, we can go I’m just I just wanted to confirm since I’m on tape, I just wanted to confirm that. Yeah. European Organization for Nuclear Research is certain. Yeah. So that’s the, you know, so maybe it’s where they’re trying to do fusion or something. But it’s cool. It’s some sciency thing. Okay. All right. So first question. Social Studies teacher. Okay, I guess I’m okay, first, honestly, nothing could be more disarming than to have you to, you’re doing this right. Like honestly, if I could have handpick two students to make me feel more comfortable. Yeah, like honestly, yeah.
This is like the highlight reel of fall semesters. Okay, okay, first question first too. I’m just gonna more fatigued.
So where did you grow up? And then what high school and university did you attend? Okay, I was born in New York City. We moved out to the New Jersey suburbs. When I was young, four or five I lived in three different Suburban. New Jersey towns. Kind of central New Jersey on the coast. So some people know of Asbury Park because of Bruce Springsteen. So I grew up in that area, kind of the northern most part of the Jersey Shore. Yeah, so I was one of those packed. People that know asked me well what exit is it because everybody identifies where they live in New Jersey based on their exit on the parkway, or the turnpike. So I was like 1050 and the zip code for my home address. Is Hello, upside down. Seriously? Yeah. Oh 7724. So if you write like block numbers, you know, and then flip it upside down says, Oh, my God. And I can’t remember. I can’t believe that. I remember that. Yeah, that’s what high school university to do. So I went to Monmouth Regional High School, which is so the town that where I spent the last part of my youth, like middle school, high school was called eatin town. And there’s nothing it’s kind of nondescript town. Probably 40 miles from New York City, you know, for commuters. So it’s still you know, it’s like an hour. Thanks, San Francisco. Yeah. commute to the big city. And yeah, so the only notable thing about that town was that like many towns from back in the day, there was, was divided by a railroad track. There was good side of town, the bad side of town. One of the big issues that we confronted was that on the border of our town, was a giant army base, Fort mama, which was I think a signal school or something. So nothing really particularly outstanding. But it meant we had a lot of, I don’t even need extra people coming to the community attending the school, who are kind of transient in the sense that they would, they’d be there for a year or two and then they were gone. And so there’s all this flux, so that those two things combined to create a lot of strife. And and the result of that were race riots. My senior year in high school, were, you know, people really getting hurt. And the last two weeks of my senior year in high school, there were literally fully armed riot gear, National Guard troops, with machine guns standing at every corner of every hallway of my high school. Yeah, well, that sounds fun, and I wasn’t there on the day of the riot. I was attending careers. So I’m dressed up in like a three piece suit. I go out for the day with some lawyer you know, I don’t have no idea when I come back. The police burn down and the windows are broken like ambulances, police sirens, and I’m gonna bail. Yeah, so another regular day here. in Monmouth Regional High School. It turns out, my brother was sitting with one of my best friends guy named Carlos Santos Bush, a black guy, and they were sitting together at lunch when the riot broke out. And you know, a big group of black guys came in basically hunting for white guys to beat the hell out of and, you know, Carlos waved them off and said, No, don’t touch him. He’s, he’s good. And he really saved my brothers, but you know what I mean, right? So anyway, that’s, that’s just part of what was interesting. I’ll tell you one other little piece of trivia. I was valedictorian of my high school class, very proud to say that back in the day, and got to give the valedictory address right, which was hilarious because they gave me the theme I couldn’t speak you know, they gave me the theme, which was kind of cornball which now I can laugh hysterically at but I tried so desperately to create a speech and you know, haven’t memorized and rehearsed. Right? And I get up there and we’re at the football stadium and there’s got to be four or 5000 people. I mean, we’re a big high school and everybody in town, the whole everybody’s happy. And I say the first words of the speech, by the way, like I say, you know, superintendent and principal parents and, and I said, you know, we are tomorrow’s pioneers. That’s the theme they gave me and as soon as I said it, the loudest thunderclap and the biggest lightning you’ve ever seen. And people literally started screaming and ran for the gym. I never said another sentence. So that’s the story of my high school graduation. So when it came to graduate from Harvard. I did. I went to Harvard. When I started my senior year, I had no plans going to Harvard. I actually thought I might go to one of the military academies. My dad had been a captain in the Turkish Navy. And so I thought very highly of all that discipline and stuff, you know, I guess I was trained to, but yeah, some sometime late in my senior year high school football season. Some recruiter probably alumni or something from Harvard. Just said wow, there’s there’s a kid that can catch a football tackle kids and and as good grades let’s and they sort of recruited me pretty heavily. for no good reason. I mean, I wasn’t a great football player. In fact, I only had played my junior and senior year but I did love it. It was, you know, glory days to borrow a phrase from a fellow New Jersey and Springsteen, right, you know, so that was that was cool. And also turns into a major regret because I roomed at Harvard with three of the football players, but each of them was like six five, 260, 280. These were giants, right. I mean, the ivy League’s not known for this, but yeah, they get some big boys right. But they get the only the only handful of them that are actually really smart. Right? But these guys would go to the gym, and they would like put 300 pounds on the benchpress to warm up. And they, you know, they said, Come on, come with us, you know, and I’m like, Dude, I can’t, I can’t. They said just just do whatever you can. We’ll help you like we’ll, you know, we’ll make sure that it’s but we’re not going to change the weights because it’s, you know, we’re not going to waste their time with that. So I would try to like lift and they would help me, you know, the whole way. But after doing it for like, three months, then I was like, you know, and I’m like, working out with them. But what happened the reason I regressed because it became like a real obsession. And so I all I wanted to do is like, gain weight and lift weights and get huge. And now as you know, guy, I’m going Oh, damn, gravity is a real thing. Remember those giant huge pegs? That looks so great on the beach? Yeah, well, now they’re like knocking your knees in there. I’m like, Dude, I gotta get a man see or hear something if I don’t. And all that obsession with gaining weight, you know to be big for like, that was dumb too. It was probably very unhealthy. Once you leave that and become sedentary then you’re like, I fought in an endless battle my entire adult life. Which, you know, only in the last two months or six weeks. Have I finally decided to get a grip on making some progress. But anyway, I’m making a lot of confess I don’t know if I’m off track here. Lot of stuff. And I know you have editing ability to take whatever interest Yeah, well, we’re not gonna do anything. Yeah. So you can say whatever, you know. So I studied my first year at Harvard, I think I studied government. But I got a summer job at Merrill Lynch. Yeah, on Wall Street. And of course, fell in love with all that and switched econ and so you know, finished out with the Econ.
And how long have you been into Macy’s? You always know that you like that’s what you wanted to go into? No, no. What’s funny is I was a stock market guy for 35 years. That’s what I did. And because of that, well, I so I did work for some big companies for a while, but most of the time, most of that career, I was trading like for myself. So what happened was I got a full time job at Merrill Lynch when I graduated. And I realized that I was an analyst and giving all this advice to the salesman and to the traders. at Merrill Lynch. And the one morning, I came up out of the subway and it was all hot and sweaty and it was banging around you know, the way subways do if you’ve ever been on New York City subway. And I came out of there kind of frustrated that morning, only to notice that the line of you know, three foot limousines, stretch limousines, you know, waiting to drop guys off at Merrill Lynch. were full of the guys who I was giving all this advice to every morning, you know, in all the analysis. So what I was helping them with, they’re using to make millions and millions of dollars and I went into my boss, I said, boss, I gotta be a traitor. Like he said, Yeah, everybody wants to be a trader. He said Merrill Lynch every three years goes between 15,040 5000 employees, right? Because you know, the market boom market bust, he says, he said right now it’s 45,000. They’re sitting on each other’s laps up there in the trading floor. He said, But, you know, first opportunity, I’ll make sure to recommend you. That was impatient. Couple days later, I go back in boss, I really got to do this. He says, okay, look, why don’t you just do it for yourself? And I think what he was imagining was, I would get it I would lose all my money and it would get out of my system. And what happened instead was I took like, $3,000 and in I might have been 90 days, something less than 90 days made. I made a million dollars. So went back I went back to nine. Yeah. Yeah, for yourself. Yeah. Wow. So I took the record printed out, walked in through it on his desk. I told you I should be a trader. He said, Dude, if this is real, and you can actually do this, he said you should go to the New York Stock Exchange, just do it for yourself. I shook his hand and went that very same day. So that’s that’s how well that started. But it wasn’t long. Afterward that the 1987 stock market crash occurred and you know, there’s a big long story related to that. But I was also at the time dating somebody pretty seriously. Who wanted to move to Chicago. So she was going to attend business school. Well, Chicago happened to be the mecca of all option traders at that time. The option trading was a bigger deal in Chicago than it was in New York. Stocks and bonds in New York, but options and futures in Chicago. So I thought, Okay, I’ll go so anyway, that’s part of how I sidestep the crash was because I was preparing to leave. But but when I got out there, instead of having, you know, 600 guys in the big stock index, option trading pit, there was, you know, 100 guys and they sat around, there was no business throwing spit wads at each other. So I left and got a job for a big bank because you know, there’s that’s where the Harvard credential helps you know, they go, Oh, here’s a guy who made some money, you know, has an education will turn them into something, right. So, and so my, my career that’s what it was. It was all these fits and starts trying to respond and support my wife. Well, she became my wife. Yeah, in every opportunity. But then also reinvent myself wherever it was. So, you know, first I moved to Chicago, which was fine. But then she got a chance to move to go to the Netherlands. She got a job in Chicago. Working for Sara Lee, which at that time, you know, owned a whole bunch of consumer brand companies, one of which was doubt Egberts coffee, they make like Pickwick tea and some other things. Yeah, it’s funny. It’s a big brand in the Netherlands and they thought, Oh, the Dutch guys are not going to like it. If we send a middle aged American manager, they’ll think that we’re, you know, imposing on them. So they said, Let’s send the innocent young new NBA girl, my wife so she gets this chance to go over. Well, it turns out it was smarter than they thought because here’s the thing. Well, I was working at this big bank I was I would do the training program for the interns like they would take MBAs oh my god and they would bring him to all the different parts of the bank. So when it was time to go to the trading floor and learn about bonds and currencies and stuff, they would come and I would teach them like all the different levels of risk and stuff. So this when you asked about teaching, this is where he started teaching. Yeah, in a sense, right? Yeah. But what happened one day was one of the guys came over to my desk on the trading floor, to ask me a question. And I had this beautiful, oval framed picture of my wife, you know, on on my desk, and he said, Oh, God, he said, Wow, do you know that woman? I said, Bull? I sure hope so. And he says, That’s the scariest woman I’ve ever known. I said, I said, What? He said, Oh, yeah, he said, I mean her international accounting claims. Nobody knows what is going on in there ever. But every question that the professor asks, she sits there with her hand up goes, ooh, you know, like, pick me. Like she knew. Okay, so, this this innocent young, you know, MBA then is asked by her company, they didn’t even realize what they had on their hands. They really did. Yeah, so they sent her to the Netherlands. But it turns out, it’s exactly when they’re trying to introduce the euro as the currency in Europe, well, all the treasurers and CFOs have no idea they don’t know what to do. Well, she figures it out. And she figures it out is out of the zone and becomes literally famous. Like this. She’s a recent MBA graduate she within one or two years she was in the treasury magazine. Top 100 Most Influential People in finance in the world. Right Yeah, no, she’s she’s a real deal right? No, you absolutely love this girl. She’s She’s like the I call her the tiger woman of international finance. Right. So yeah, but the bankers realized, Oh, my God, like, here’s somebody that knows how to do to figure this stuff out. So they started carting around Europe, giving speeches at conferences, and she literally became so meanwhile, i i Go working for myself on the floor of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, you know, buying and selling options in Dutch. And as soon as I feel like I’ve really got it sorted out, right, yeah. She says, Oh, guess what? It’s time to go home. You know, our expat deal is over, and she gets recruited by another company. So at that time, Cisco was at the pinnacle of its, its prime in the internet bubble, and they recruited her heavily. So but literally by the time we got home to Chicago. We were ready to turn around because Cisco told her to go to Dublin, Ireland. They said we’re gonna give you five years and we’re gonna set up a bank and all the financial stuff and all the business right, because Dublin, turning itself into a taxi. Well, so I get to stay behind a couple of months, so that my daughter can finish, third grade or whatever it is, yeah. And sell the house pack everything up move. So the day before I finally go, so she’s there for four or five months. So by the time I pack up and go I checked the weather, and it says Dublin, Ireland. 72 degrees in sunny I’m like, damn, like, first or second week in June. I’m like, yes. It’s gonna be great. Well, I arrived the next day. It’s 38 degrees in pouring rain. The first guy I meet is like the next door neighbor. And I asked him I say, What happened to summer? And he said, Oh, you missed it like it was yesterday. Okay, so in Dublin, I do the same thing I try to get I get a it takes me a month or so. But I I I arranged to manage the the US Dollar Portfolio of AIG, which Allied Irish a great big Irish bank. But none of the Irish guys want to work hours that would have them watching the American market. And I figured, well, that’s that’s kind of what I do. So this is perfect.
So I take a month to negotiate this deal. I’m going to manage like a $2 billion portfolio for these guys get a great big cut of the profits that I make. And I come home ready to tell my wife and she greets me at the door and she says Oh, I’ve gotten news, and I’m like, Oh, I’ve got new. And then as the gentleman I say, you tell me what, what is it? And she says, I’ve already done all the things they said it would take me five years to do in like five or six months. And now they want to promote me and bring me to San Jose. What was your news? And I said there third serving a new beer at the pub. You know, I made some I never told him. It was I mean years later I told him so once again, but that’s what brought us to California. Okay, and then how long have you been teaching like is it just an LG so here’s here’s the clincher of that story. So I come to California, and I start trying to reinvent myself training on my own. But we suffer seven deaths in my immediate family. Oh, yeah. So it’s one of my brother was in a car accident. Three of the six family members were were killed instantly. My my my brother died in my arms. After I cared for him in our home for like a year. He wasted away when he died. He weighed like 53 pounds. I can pick them up in one arm and change the bedsheets. Yeah, it was really sad. And then two weeks after he died, my mother died literally have a broken heart and like put his head his picture on the coffee table laid down and just said that’s it. I’m done. You know, just had a big heart attack or something. And then it was maybe a year later or something. I lost my father. And it was just kind of a lot. And so you know, I’m trying to trade or invest. But I’m sort of struggling. And my wife at this point. She’s like, you know, we’ve really done really well and why do we want to risk all that? Well, you’re sitting there contemplating the, you know, the meaning of life and the union. And so in her great wisdom, she said, look, we’ve always talked about designing and building a house. Why don’t you Why don’t you take a sabbatical from trading and find us a property designers build us a house. So I do that it takes a while but find the property. It’s on the corner next to Dave’s Avenue School or houses and, you know, buy the property designed to house yeah, go through all the rigmarole meanwhile, since we tore the house down that was there. The school district, which the district office used to be at Dave’s evidence now at Fisher they gave me a letter the next day they said oh, your daughter can’t come to our school. Because you don’t live here. You just tore the house down. Oh, okay. So here’s, you know, it doesn’t matter. You gotta live in the district, because everybody wants their kids to come to the good schools. Okay, so this is like 2004 I think. So she was in third, I think because it was Dave’s away. As it turns out. It wasn’t even that late with Dave’s away where they bust them over to the rebuilding the split. The younger daughter’s 25. Yeah. And I’m not sure if I have all these details exactly. What happened we had to rent a house. The only house available in Los Gatos at the time was on Littlefield Lane across the street from Alec Schultz. I am now and honors biology teacher and now a member of the school board. So I live across the street from his house in what is now a mansion but was then just a literal tear me down hokey Chun but you know, in all humility that we just needed the place immediately. And okay, so I build the house but become friends with Mr. Schultz. And and here’s how it happened. So now it’s like, I think, the fall 2008. And so we’re almost completed with our house. But it’s also based my econ students know that that is the middle of the financial crisis. So the Schultz is invite my daughter over my older daughter, who’s now at least got his high school to the poro pre Koro taking pictures, you know, everybody gets Yeah, they all they all need and the parents and everybody anyway, so he throws this big thing. And I don’t know anybody, right? So I’m just sitting in the corner, you know, probably having a beer, Coca Cola or something, and start chatting with somebody, you know, a parent or a teacher, I forget. But I start getting animated and telling them you’re explaining what was happening in the economy in the financial markets. And before I know it before I look up and you guys have experienced the ceramics, right, so you know, so I got into one of those right? And before I realized that, there were probably 20 adults gathered in like three rings. The meaning is to hear what I was saying, because they’re all losing their money. They’re all having their homes foreclosed. They’re all like, you know, yeah, their mortgages their, you know, their stock portfolios, right. And here, I’m just spewing all my my suppose it knowledge, right. It turned out that it was it was all very timely and pretty accurate. All the stuff I was saying, you know, saying what would happen next, and it’s not nearly over this isn’t October, Lehman Brothers had just happened and I’m saying we’re not even close to this being done. You know, it’s 30 or 40%. Lower in the s&p, and a lot of painful foreclosures later it finally bottomed in March of 2009. But anyway, after, after the party I stayed late because I lived across the street. I stayed late to help them clean up. And Alex said, he came over to me while we’re clean, and he said, he said do Do you realize what you did? And I was like, oh, gosh, I said I’m do I need to apologize. I’m so sorry, what? And he said no, no he said, those were leaders of industry. Those are teachers. He said these weren’t like CFOs and CEOs in Silicon Valley. He said, You they were you had an eating out of your head like, like they were riveted like some of those people literally would argue with every sentence that somebody else would say, and they didn’t question you once. Like you both explained what you were saying and you were so you know, convincing or whatever, that they didn’t even dare question it. And I said, Oh, is that good? He said look he said we don’t have an honors or AP econ teacher at Los Gatos High School, and no high school is legit if they don’t have you know, AP Physics and AP econ. And he said, Would you consider coming to teach? And I said, Well, that’s very flattering. I’ve never thought about it before. He said, Well, listen, why don’t you come as a substitute? And just see if you like. And so I decided to do that. So this is like, now it’s like by the time I do this, it’s the spring of 2009. My daughter is graduating with the class of 2009. Her friends, she was in leadership class, her friends would come over to the house. And we I I’d host two dozen leadership kids. I was the guy that would run out at midnight and get them pizzas or you know, make the chocolate chip pancakes for him in the morning and all this stuff. So there was this small group of kids that knew me I was also a softball coach in town. So there was others who knew me for that reason. So when I came to the high school the first day I went to Mr. Rogers classroom, I was looking for whoever was the department chair thinking that meant something and I had to shake his hand and say, hi, Marilyn, when it doesn’t work that way. But you know, that’s what I thought at the time. So as soon as I poked my face in the tiny little narrow window in the back of Rogers classroom, it turned out that that group of leadership students, were all jam packed into his comparative gov class. Yeah. And as soon as they saw one of them saw my face, she literally screamed, it’s uncle arrow.
And the whole whole class jumped up, ran to the door, drag me inside, and it was like that. It was almost like a parade or something. And how could you resist that sort of a welcome. Yeah. And so I did substitute for the last four weeks of the year, and the woman who I substituted for, decided to call maternity leave. And so at the end of the year, they said, if you’d like to apply, you know, you’ve done a nice job. You seemed like a decent fellow. And they said, all you have to do is complete this in that course or something. Yeah, take some CSET test to qualify as a teacher and then you could actually teach, you could be the teacher of record, even though you didn’t have a credential. As long as you’ve completed these certain steps, then you could do it as an intern. So I literally became a full time teacher within two and a half months of setting foot in the high school partly because of my background, you know, education and stuff. I also like, so they told me you had to take the CSET. So it’s a test in three parts world history, US history, econ. Gov geography, all this stuff. I told my daughter I said, Bring home five textbooks. This is the only test that I could take that would qualify me to do this the next year. Was that Saturday? Oh, so she brought five textbooks home she borrowed them from the school you know, textbook office, literally a history textbook, an econ textbook, a gov textbook. They were leave out world history us whatever. Okay, yeah, I read one textbook a day. And on Saturday, I signed up for all three tests, nor most people will take one of the tests. You know, there’s like one part on world one part on us one part on econ. gov and geography, or California history some and I signed up for all three at once. Pass all three. Yeah, that’s good. And then, you know, get get the one or two whatever the number of classes that I had to do I did over the summer and showed up and they said your teacher. Wow. And there was no looking back since then. It’s every year they everybody said oh, he’s he just did this, you know, on a when he’s gonna retire. He’s gonna leave you know, he has that. He doesn’t need to do this. He he’ll go back to do and every year, I think, you know, yeah, I can go back but it’s always going to be there. Yeah, but I mean, I’m enjoying it. And at first, I thought it would be easy for me to quickly learn how to be a good teacher. But the more you’re, the longer you’re a teacher. The more humble you become. And the more you realize, oh, I’m just starting to learn how to actually connect with each of my students. So I finished swirl marks I have a status. Yes. I’m sorry. I know. I’m being really literally the whole the whole story. No, I detail. That’s part of we Yeah, we’re I think some of the interesting tidbits are but you guys will pick and choose exactly what you think is interesting, whatever. And then just like some factual details, how long have you been teaching? 14 years? 14 years? This is your 14th year completed my full year? Yes, less that. And so yeah, besides econ, you’ve taught, so I taught intro to law when they had that as an elective. I’ve taught us history. I taught in New Tech, lead, valor, whatever they call that. Right. I taught that one or two years. So yeah, I think so. You know, honors econ, regular econ. And the honors econ instead of AP. Econ is an interesting discussion. We can Yeah, that could be where we start next time. Yeah, totally. I guess would it be okay, we have a legato sixth period. Yeah. Would it be possible