I think there’s a time in everyone’s life when you look back and ask yourself, What else could I have been? What else could I have done? With me there’s just no question about the answer, none at all.
If I couldn’t have been an engineer, I would’ve been a teacher. Not a high school teacher, not a college teacher. A fifth-grade teacher. I specifically wanted to be a fifth-grade teacher ever since I was in fifth grade.
This was something I wanted to do since so early in life. Who knows where these things come from? Probably because my fourth-and fifth-grade teacher, Miss Skrak, was so good to me and I liked her so much. I felt she had helped me so much in life by encouraging me. And I believed, truly believed, that education was important.
I remember my father telling me way back then that it was education that would lift me up to where I wanted to go in life, that it could lift people up in values. I remember how he said that the world was kind of screwed up at the time—there was the Cold War between the USSR and the United States and all that. And he said that with education, the newer generation could learn from the mistakes of their parents and do a better job.
I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.
But by the time I was in high school and college, I’d kind of forgotten about my goals of working in education. There were times when it glimmered back at me. This girl at Berkeley, Holly, the first girl I kissed, well, a relative of her roommate brought round to our dorm a baby, four months old. And Holly, who was interested in child psychology, started doing all kinds of little games with the baby, trying to test where the baby was in its own head. Like she’d move a pencil and see if the baby’s eyes would follow it, that sort of thing. I remember how that just struck me that day, this notion of cognitive development. How shocking it was to me to suddenly realize that the mind really develops in identifiable stages. Almost like logic in a computer, it’s predictable. It was like logic, the thing I was into at the time, an intriguing kind of process—a game with rules.
That made me really remember my desire to be a teacher, and for the rest of my life I was always paying a lot of attention to children wherever I went. Infants, babies, younger children, older children. I’d try to relate to them, to smile, to tell them jokes, to be kind of part of their company. I’d been brought up with the idea that there were “bad people” who might hurt children or kidnap them, so I decided I would be a “good guy” any kid who met me could rely on.
Some people just love being around children, others don’t as much. I remember one summer when I was working at HP, Steve Jobs told me he really needed a job for some extra money. I drove him down to see the job listings over at De Anza Community College, and we found this job listing for people to stand in Westgate Mall for a week dressed in Alice in Wonderland costumes. They needed an Alice, a White Rabbit, and a Mad Hatter. I was so intrigued. I drove Steve down to the guy who was interviewing people and telling them what it was like. Basically you put on these costumes, he said, and carry some helium balloons and you stand around. You can’t talk to the children, but they’ll all be around looking at you, he said.
“Can I do it, too?” I asked. I loved the idea. So basically, they hired Steve, his girlfriend Chris Ann, and me as the Alice in Wonderland characters. We took turns in the costumes with some other people because, even after a twenty-minute stretch, these costumes got terribly hot and sweaty inside. You could hardly breathe. So sometimes I would be the White Rabbit and Steve would be the Mad Hatter, and sometimes it would be the other way around.
It was kind of funny because you had really limited mobility in those big costumes. I remember I went out as the Mad Hatter once, and all of a sudden about ten kids started grabbing me by my arms and my sleeves and spinning me around. For fun. They were laughing! And I couldn’t say anything to stop them, because there were a lot of kids doing it and I wasn’t allowed to talk. They could have toppled me! I was lucky they didn’t.
I thought this job was so fun I even cut back my engineering hours and took an hourly minimum wage for that week so I could spend more time doing it. I loved looking at the kids’ faces when they saw us. I just loved it.
We’d take lunch breaks in our regular clothes and eat at this little restaurant in the mall. One day this little kid—this tiny little kid—points at my tennis shoes and says, “Hey, he’s the Mad Hatter!” I told him, “Hey, be quiet!” Ha. That was a very fun week. So fun.
But Steve didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. I remember years and years later, I was commenting to him how much fun that Alice in Wonderland mall job was, and he said, “No, it was lousy. We hardly got paid anything for it.” So he had bad memories of it, but I just had the best memories of it. I guess I thought everyone was like me and would like doing something like that with kids.
I loved being a parent, too. It was great. I didn’t read books on parenting; I didn’t want to read about any structured rules. I wanted to relate to and communicate with the child. Because if you can talk to them, then they’ll talk to you about most of the things in their life. I wanted to expose them to creative thinking, I wanted to show them that you don’t have to narrow and restrict your thinking the way so many people do. I never once tried to impress even my own values in life on any one of my kids.
I wanted to be like my dad. I remember his conversations with me; he would always point out all sides of an issue. I would know what he thought about it, but he would let me come to my own decisions, which very often turned out to be like his. He was a very, very good teacher. So I intended to be that way, too.
Candi and I had three children. The first was Jesse, who was born the night before the US Festival that Labor Day weekend in 1982. Then Sara came two years later. And Gary was born in 1987, after Candi and I had already divorced. So that was hard.
With Jesse, when he just a few months old I had the most fun with him doing what I called these “flying tours.” I would hold him so that his belly was over my palm and he could see everything from the correct perspective. (I got the idea from Candi’s brother, Peter Clark, who told me that if you hold a baby on its back, it’s always seeing everything differently than grown-ups do.) But the other way, the baby could see the world like we do. It was just logical.
So I used to hold baby Jesse that way, and all of a sudden I could see his eyes would look to the left or the right a little. Then his head would move in one direction and stay there, and I’d realize, Oh, okay, he’s looking at the window shade. So what I did was I’d take him over to it. It was only fair. I’d let him touch it—I’d move his hands against it—and when he was done, he’d turn his head again, like maybe back toward his mom, and we’d zoom back to her.
So we started getting in the habit of doing this. He’d be lying on my palm, looking at the big TV, and I’d take him to it. Or to the shelf, which had a top and an edge he could feel. So he started getting around the world this way, and he’d always come back to home base at the end.
Jesse got more and more confident. We’d start from home base and then go room by room through the entire house. He’d explore. I could feel his muscles tense in a certain way I could interpret as “Lift me up a little more” or “Let’s go a little lower.” Sometimes, when he got a little bigger, he would wave his arms and his feet like he was a mad swimmer, and that meant “Go as fast as you can.” So we had this great form of communication between us, and this was all before he was even eight months old. I was no longer just looking at the movements his head made; I’d feel his muscles tensing to tell me which way to go. I used to tell people this, and they didn’t believe me. So I’d tell them, “Okay, I’ll close my eyes. Drop something.” And then Jesse would just tense his muscles and lead me right down to it. It really surprised people.
I would try this with other babies—these flying tours—and I found out that after about twenty minutes, I could do it with them, too. All babies were the same! All babies gave the same muscle signals. I loved that I had figured out a way to let Jesse choose what to explore, before he could even crawl or walk, without having to be totally dependent on someone else.
When Jesse got bigger and too heavy for the flying tours, I got into these little Honda scooters. I had the little 80 and 120 cubic centimeter scooters. They’re real small, like a bike with a little motor in it.
Up there in the Santa Cruz Mountains where we lived, there were a lot of little windy roads and very few cars. So I could put Jesse on the scooter and we could just go everywhere. I’d let him decide if we would go left or right, and I’d describe things we saw and then let him touch them—we’d say the words “leaf,” or “water,” or “tree.” He chose every single turn we made. Eventually—over a period of a couple of years—he could get into his favorite routes. I remember these as such wonderful, wonderful days.
By 1988 I was a full-time dad. I was finished with CL 9. By then we had also had our second child, a girl this time, Sara. Sara and Candi became really bonded, as bonded as Jesse and I were.
But Candi and I still weren’t getting along. By this time we were already heading for divorce. A critical point happened the night after a concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater. We had a tradition with Jesse that the front passenger seat was the “story seat” and whoever got to sit there would get a story I would make up from the driver’s seat. Now, I’m not a writer, and don’t ask me how I did it, but I could come up with the most amazing stories. Science fiction stories, usually, and they would go on and on.
But one night Candi and I got into this fight. She felt like she’d drunk too much to drive, and she wanted me to drive. That was fine with me. But she wanted to sit in the story seat, the front passenger seat. Jesse objected, because he wanted to hear a story. And I begged him, begged him, to please sit in the back and I would still tell a story. But he wouldn’t get in the backseat. And Candi and I got in the hugest fight because of that. Very shortly after that, it was divorce time.
So now, suddenly, I was in a new house of my own in Los Gatos. The kids spent one week at my house and one week with Candi. I didn’t have any business going on, CL 9 wasn’t going on, so I could focus all my energy on the kids.
It was at about this time that I redirected my philanthropic activities from museums and ballet to schools in Los Gatos. This was about 1989, and computers in schools were starting to become the big talked-about thing. There were going to be computer “haves” and computer “have-nots.” So I started providing computers to schools—setting up computer labs with dozens of computers in them as gifts to the schools and the kids.
Eventually I worked out a deal with my local elementary school, the one that Jesse was by then attending. It was the Lexington Elementary School in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It sure was an unusual environment for a school. Not like the ones that are all flat and spread out. It looked rustic, out in the middle of nature with the mountains, the trees, and the Lexington Reservoir nearby. This school was also neat because it only had one classroom for every grade. It was a small school.
So I got to know a lot of people there, especially the school moms, who really are the ones who do so much of the stuff. I couldn’t really bring myself to do the home school club—that was the PTA-style group they had—I couldn’t make the time. But with the computers, I thought I could make myself useful to the kids and the school in other ways.
Around this same time, I started teaching Jesse about computers. He was in the fourth grade by this time. He would go into his room—he had his own computer with a keyboard—and he was this little kid sitting in front of it. He would just type away all day long. At first he couldn’t type very well. He would hunt and peck. But very quickly he learned how to cut and paste text from one page to another so he wouldn’t have to retype it.
By the end of fourth grade, his computer skills had evolved so quickly. Sometime during that year, he was actually answering questions I had—like if I was having trouble finding out where something was in the system, he would tell me what menu to look in. I showed him how to do spreadsheets and do calculations so he could do his math homework from school with it. He could set it up and do it all on the spreadsheet so the teachers wouldn’t see the formula, just the answer. But, of course, I told him he had to do it by hand first, before doing it on the computer. He had to have one handwritten one done, to show me he knew how to do it, and then he would turn in these really nice printouts.
Believe me, there was no other kid in fourth grade who was turning in a spreadsheet and printout for his math homework assignments.
And Jesse just loved doing it. He always stuck by the rule of having to do the homework the real way first—before you do it on the computer. But he loved any homework he could do with his computer. Like typing reports. He loved that.
That year, one of Jesse’s schoolmates, Elena, was having trouble in school. I’d known her since she was born. Her mom called and told me that her grades were going down; she wasn’t achieving, just having a really hard time. I cared a lot about Elena. So I decided I would go over to her house and we would sit down together. I would take her through ideas to put in reports she would write. We would try to put in comedy—just to make it fun for her. And I’d show her how you do it on the computer.
That became her motivation, doing it on the computer. It was something special, and she really got into it. All her grades in school started going up. Her parents gave me all this credit. She loved doing any homework she could do on the computer; she was a smiling girl and doing well in school. She grew into a woman who is today an incredibly great speaker as well as an actress.
So then I started thinking. If this was so successful with Elena—taking her from basically flunking out of school to A’s and B’s—what if I could do that with other kids? Why not give it a try? But I was a little scared. Can I teach a group of kids? What’s involved? I really did want to teach them normal things—math, reading, writing, history—but how was I going to be able to do that? I don’t have a teaching credential or anything.
So I thought, That’s it. I’m going to be a teacher. I’ll teach a computer class. The next year was the fifth grade. I took six kids out of Jesse’s fifth-grade class and put them in computer class. And we started out the class by unscrewing the computers to look at the parts, and I taught them Base 2—1s and 0s, how numbers were represented in computer language. We didn’t carry the Base 2 stuff very far throughout the year; I thought I was going to teach them how computers work. It’s something easy for a fifth grader to learn; you don’t need higher-level math. And we did that.
But the primary goal was to teach them how to make their homework look good. The state of computers back then was such that this only got about one-third of class time attention. Back then, computers were more unreliable, and more subject to software and hardware bugs. On any given day, a hard disk might stop working. Or a battery might go bad. A buggy program might corrupt some files.
Back then, maintaining a computer was a difficult task. So another third of the class involved maintaining the computers. Installing new software and hardware, identifying hardware problems, identifying and fixing software problems of all types. Finally we spent a lot of time on online and network things. Every single year, from the very first class on, I bought AOL accounts for all the students.
It was important that they learn to communicate with people far away, and in a way that had never been done before. The two things my students did the most were to download fun software like games and freeware utilities and visit chat rooms. I encouraged them to go as far as they could in chat rooms. They found it amusing to pretend to be other people, to pretend to be older than they were. Even though it might take them two minutes to type a short sentence, the girls would claim to be nineteen years old. The boys were always honest.
Some of the girls would get too excited and scream to the rest of their class that they were making a date with another nineteen-year-old! Yeah, right. The thing I always noticed was that the other “nineteen-year-old” was also typing a sentence every two minutes. None of them could type when they started my class, but they sure started learning.
And the things I learned in my ten years as a teacher, well, they’re just too numerous to count. I felt this was the most important time in my life.