Mike Sullivan:  

Just in case anyone still remembers me and/or ever wondered where I'd been for the thirty years career after I left the hallowed halls of Lincoln HS in 1964, here are a few of the highlights: After 4 years at CWSC I spent 29 years in a juvenile prison. That¿s where I taught for the last 29 years of my 30 years of public school teaching. My first year of teaching was in Carnation Washington. It was without a doubt the worst year of my life. I was It. Mister Music for the whole district. Marching Band, Choir, Glee Clubs, flute trio for the PTA, you name it. I was in charge of six concerts in the four days before Christmas. It was way too much responsibility for a beginning teacher and their expectations were unreal. I hated it. I quit as soon as I could that June. Two months later, the summer of '69, I applied for a music position in the Chehalis School District. Only after I arrived did I find that it was for teaching music in the juvenile prison called Green Hill School. I was hired on the spot. My students were all the ones you told your kids not to play with. Armed robbers, house burglars, gang members, murderers, rapists, child molesters, name anything; I had them in my classes. I loved it there. After trying to teach normal band instruments for mostly beginners, in a place where my students were entered and withdrawn at random over months or weeks even, I scrapped the band instruments and started teaching guitar lessons six classes a day. I did that for about twelve years. I progressed from simple folk song picking to R&B, hard rock, and then to whatever the kid wanted to learn. A kid would bring in a tape, I¿d learn it in 10 to 20 minutes and then teach him how to play it IF he was up to that skill level. For the beginners wanting to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan in Texas Flood I would simply tell him to go soak his head in the toilet. Most of my students however were happy to just start from scratch. As time went on and the kids were having longer and longer sentences, I'd have students that got better than I, and that's when I knew I was getting good at my job. In my spare time after school in my second year there, the Chehalis SD was just beginning to realize the importance of beginning a sex and drug education curriculum for their students. They soon realized that their schools wouldn't be allowed to teach all that their kids should know about. A local Episcopal Priest suggested a telephone Hot Line. I volunteered and helped it get off the ground. I stayed with it for about 9 years. I was doing both the volunteer training and working th...Expand for more