“After this guy from Arizona talked to the superintendent, ‘Is it all right (nasty) if they win this grant from the Department of Education on magnet status?’ I will call these courses, Math, English, whatever he wants me to call them, knowing full well that I couldn’t write a grant proposal in the two weeks that were left. So I called the Vice President of IBM, the guy I met, and told him that the Superintendent said if I could write a grant proposal to the U.S. Department of Education and get it accepted and I’ve got two weeks to do it, he’ll let my program continue. Well, that Vice President of IBM called a grant writer from New York and one from Florida, whose whole job in their life is to write grants. And they flew out and I worked until midnight every afternoon after school and they wrote the grants.
“Now, to write a grant is impossible. You’ve got to cost out two-inches of wire, if that’s what it takes. You have to cost out a bolt, a nut, everything has to be costed out. It isn’t only the idea and what you’re going to do, it’s the individual pieces of what you want. Well, they wrote a good one, because we won the grant. $1.5 million. We got our magnet grant at the Denver Schools at George Washington High School and that’s when I left. That’s when IBM wanted me to work with them, to teach other teachers how to teach. My wife wanted me to leave Denver and see the world, because I had lived here my whole life. … I didn’t even know what the National Council of Teachers of Math was.”