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PEOPLE
eldra avery
english teacher— san Luis Obispo high school By Will Jones “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson I first met Eldra Avery when we were students in an adolescent literature class at Cal Poly in 1985. Both of us were in our mid-thirties, re-entry graduate students working on teaching credentials, hoping to eventually teach English in one of the local school districts. At the end of class one day, Eldra approached me and said, “Will, I like you. You know why? Because you’re smart!” I was flattered but also nonplussed by what seemed like a sincere but slightly condescending compliment. It wasn’t until Eldra and I spent twenty-two years working together at San Luis Obispo High School that I came to understand and respect how sacred “smart” is to Eldra. Now she is beginning her thirtieth year as one of the most admired and highly regarded teachers in the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, a woman defined by Emerson’s famous quote from “Self Reliance.” Eldra was born in St. Louis. Her father was a truck driver and her mother a housewife. The Averys moved to Orange County when she was in second grade. “My mother taught me the same lesson over and over again: ‘Eldra, you’re going to go to college and get an education because that’s something no one can take away from you.’ I didn’t completely get it until high school when I started getting straight A’s. I loved school, especially reading, but I didn’t know then that I would become an English teacher.” Dancing in high school led to a scholarship to San Diego State, where she fell in love, married young, and started raising her daughter, Tamara, while her husband was in Vietnam. The marriage did not survive the separation, but Eldra is still friends with John Berteaux, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy and teaches in the Division of Humanities and Communication at CSU Monterey Bay.
Eldra eventually reconnected with an old friend, Donald Avery, whom she had known since fifth grade. They married and moved to San Luis Obispo while Donald attended architecture school at Cal Poly. Their son, Jake, was born in 1972. Jake was in my first English class at SLOHS in 1989 and received my first ever ‘Jack Kerouac Say Yes to Life and Literature’ award. He now lives in Portland with his wife Jackie and their daughter Beatrix. After returning to school in the mid-seventies, earning an English degree from Cal Poly, Eldra taught dance at Cuesta for six years, from 1980 to 1986. “I thought I wanted to be a writer, because I’d had some success with that, but I focused on dance. Injuries finally drove me out of that profession.” A turning point for Eldra came when Tamara, attending Cal Poly in the mid-eighties, struggled with writing essays in her English class even though she had done well in high school. “I decided I wanted to become a high school English teacher, to teach literature and writing. I started taking continuation classes and completed my credential in the spring of 1986,” a class that yielded three SLOHS English teachers: Eldra, Mark Bindner and myself, although I first spent three years at Los Osos Middle School. Anyone who knows Mrs. Avery knows that once she makes a commitment to a goal, nothing stands in her way. She excelled as an 11th grade honors teacher while also making Yearbook one of the smoothest operating production classes on campus, overseeing its transition to the computer design and digital age. At the request of former principal Mary Matakovich, Eldra transformed her honors class into an 11th grade Advanced Placement class, and soon her students were passing the Advanced Placement English
Eldra and one of her quilts A U G U S T
2015
Journal PLUS