“Well, we got inroads with the Language Department after this and we started the first Internets in the United State or World. We discovered cities in Spain and Mexico, where our Spanish students wrote a story about themselves in Spanish and the students in those countries corrected it and sent it back in Spanish. And then they wrote stories in English, and our students corrected it and sent it back. And the University of Colorado allowed us to use their computer to send these messages around the world at night, when they weren’t using their computer.

“So we had a very interesting thing going with the Language Department and students of various cultures correcting each other. That’s how we used it. Except, all new students got on it [the computer] right away. The guy that we hired to do Hmong didn’t require the vowels. He used the language they used for teletypes and telegraphs and that wasn’t useful, because none of the kids knew that. So we never got that done for Hmong. That was our first expensive grant and we turned out all right with it.”

NEXT: HOURS AT THE HIGH SCHOOL