(June 11, 2010) — Technology teacher Roger Smith says, “Gosh, I don’t know” what impact he left on Clark, and begins to praise other teachers. But science teacher Gerald Gruss has a difficult time choosing which one of his many impacts to discuss. Smith, now 70 years old, will retire this year with 42 years of teaching experience, of which at least he’s not too modest to admit, with a laugh, “that’s a long time.” And though that’s about as far as Smith is willing to acknowledge his work, Gruss says that when Smith leaves, Clark will not be the same. “You know, it’s such a question mark as to what things will look like for next year with Mr. Smith being gone,” Gruss said. “I’ll miss him insisting on opening the door and having everybody go in front of him. He never would let anybody hold the door for him.” Smith commonly branched off on such moral lessons as he traversed through the now-famous “male and female computer parts” and binary code components of the tech. literacy curriculum. “I tell the kids, you know, I would be on the road, and out in the middle of the desert—there’s nobody coming and nobody going—and there’s a stop sign, and I’m going to stop at that stop sign because that’s the right thing to do,” Smith said. Smith says he learned these lessons as a child in his small Texas hometown, Palacios, prior to joining the Air Force and moving to teach in California. And such moral lessons are what he hopes to have more time to teach his grandchildren when he retires. “When you think about it, I’m 70 years old, and you know, some time you’re not going to be around here anymore, so you want to spend time with people—my wife and my children and my grandchildren, see them grow up and to be good people,” he said. Gruss never overlooked what he sees as Smith’s best characteristic: generosity of spirit. According to him, Smith always shares everything he knows and has, such as the monthly technology updates Gruss received in his teacher mailbox. “I knew it was from him,” Gruss said. Last year, Smith was one of six recipients of the Delmonte award, which recognized his years of work as a technology teacher—30 of which he spent at Crescenta Valley High School prior to founding the Tech. Literacy class at Clark. Smith, however, is more ready to speak of the impacts the students left on him. “You have the students that start out slow, and they probably are not always on task, but then there’s a few students you see that they just keep growing—they keep growing, and that’s probably the greatest impact for me is to see students grow, improve. And you know they have ability, they just have to produce it, show me,” Smith said. As for what Smith will miss, amidst the teachers and the facility and the computer parts quiz, Smith says he’ll miss the noise. “I’m not talking about bad noise,” Smith said. “I’m just talking about the noise of the students.”