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| 1962 John Jay High School yearbook photo |
The News & Observer August 1, 2002
Durham -- When Armando "Mickey" Henriquez Jr. started teaching high school in Westchester County, N.Y., Hula-Hoops were the rage. Now, in the era of Power Puff Girls and the XBox, Henriquez, who is 72, is still at it. He teaches the 50-plus crowd for free at the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement in Durham.
"He's always been a good teacher," said his wife, Martha, who is also a teacher. "It doesn't surprise me that the adults love his class too. He has groupies who take every class he teaches."
DILR is not where his teaching stops. Grandchildren call him to read him their college essays. He gives tips to friends. He has taken time to edit the paper of a nursing aide assigned to work with his father. Educating is in his blood.
"He wouldn't survive without teaching," his wife said. "It's his passion."
Here Henriquez talks about the career he just couldn't give up.
Q - How hard was it to leave New York and your teaching career?
A - It wasn't an easy thing to do. There were connections. I had taught there for 33 years, taught the children of former students. But the town was changing. It became very expensive to live there. I didn't want to go to Florida, where I grew up, and play golf and do the usual things you associate with senior citizens who retire. In Durham, I could be near our children and take classes.
Q - You wanted a break from teaching and retired early, but you ended up doing just that. How did that happen?
A - I thought I would take creative writing classes and follow the dream as English teachers do and write the great American novel. I took a writing class and it got canceled after the second semester. My son told me about the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement. I took a couple of classes. A teacher who knew I used to teach asked me to do a lecture on "The Education of Henry Adams" for the next year. It was well received and I liked the idea of an audience where no one was fighting puberty and they had as much or more education than I did. It's a different kind of teaching.
Q - You called it "a different kind of teaching." Do you get a different meaning now from the work you do?
A - It's like taking a skill you've done all your life and putting it in a different setting. When I taught "King Lear" to honor students in high school, they could understand it. But to them, he was a crazy old man. When I teach "King Lear" to students who are 60, 70 and 80, they see themselves in King Lear. He's trying to give up his authority. They're no longer in charge of companies. ... It's exciting when you get an engineer who has never taken Shakespeare and finally finds out what the fuss is all about. Or someone who had poetry ruined for them in high school and they're giving it another chance. ... I cast one older man, who must have been in his 80s, in Albee's "The American Dream" as the "younger man." He came to class all dressed up. I remember he forgot his spats and had to go home to get them. He had so much fun playing the "young man." He died the next week. Those kinds of experiences make this something very special.
Q - Do you ever see yourself giving up teaching, doing something else?
A - Every year, I say I'm not going to do it anymore. But once you're a teacher, if you really see teaching as a passion, you get caught.
Copyright 2002 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.
