Mr. David Moore, who has been teaching at Skyline High School for thirty-two years, is retiring after the 2022-2023 school year ends. He has taught various classes in the English department at Skyline for 18 years, and is currently teaching IB English HL2 and Sophomore Honors English. He is excited to be able to relax after a fitful career. “I didn’t realize until this year that I’m tired of working so hard. It’s a lot of work to teach.” 

Despite his continued passion for literature, his road to the realization that he wants to teach English was filled with tribulation. “After high school I got accepted to UCLA, because I wanted to go to their film school, but it was just so expensive to live on my own in Los Angeles that I came back to Utah.” After much trial and error in picking a major at the University of Utah, he was influenced by his past jobs, and realized he wanted to teach English: “I just decided to finally do what I really liked, which was dealing with literature and writing and stuff like that. Plus, I owned a couple of restaurants that employed high school and college aged students, and I really enjoyed working with them, so I put those two things together: my love of literature and writing and words, and my enjoyment of working with young people—boom! I was a teacher.” 

This fortunate combination ended up working well in the long run, and the most rewarding part of teaching for him continues to be the interactions with students, especially the students at Skyline: “One day, in my Sophomore class we were taking a test, and the room was absolutely silent, everybody’s testing. And somebody farted, and it was audible, everybody could hear it. And they told me that I looked up, and I looked around the room, and I went, ‘Run for your lives!’ […] It seems like something I would do.”

An integral aspect of Moore’s tenure at Skyline has been his dedication to explore and teach valuable literature. He has benefited from, and been challenged by the flexibility in book selection that the International Baccalaureate program offers. For Moore, one of these challenges was keeping his content useful and relevant to what students would want to learn. “I never do things the same way two years in a row. I borrow stuff from previous years, but then I always drop stuff and add stuff every year. Even this year, I’m still improving and adapting stuff even when I should just be coasting through my last year.” Moore has particularly enjoyed incorporating post-modernist works into his IB curriculum.

During his retirement, he plans to continue to read for fun. “In Senior IB, we read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, and I really like his stuff, so when I retire I plan to use the time to read all of his stuff. And then there are things that have always been on my want-to-read list that I never have gotten to, like Catch-22 [by Joseph Heller].” He also wants to devote more time to his hobbies. He says, “I started getting into reselling mid century modern antiques, and I really enjoy doing that, and looking forward to spending a lot of time doing that.”

Ms Kirsten Rector, one of the current IB Coordinators at Skyline, will be taking over in teaching IB English HL2 next year. Ms Rector has worked hard to prepare a fresh, new lineup of works for the Senior IB students to study for next year. About these selections, Mr Moore comments, “I’d be excited too, she’s got a good list there. From what I’ve heard, she’s got some great ideas and great plans, so you’ll be lucky.”