Scene 08 · Thirty-one years
Before I was Mrs. Martinez, I was simply Cathy.
Thirty-one years in public and private education. Thousands of students. One conviction that never moved.
Born the fifth of ten children to Jesus S. and Ana Aguon on a military base in Naha, Okinawa, Japan, Catherine's early life was shaped by both family and service. Her father brought the family from the island of Guam to the United States while serving in the U.S. Army, stationed with the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, California.
Her love of learning was set by her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hill, a tall, regal woman who was soft-spoken yet firm, and who said the words Catherine carried for the rest of her life:
"Go back and do it again, my dear, because you are so much better than this. Now go show me who you are."
She recognized her calling early, teaching catechism at her church at the age of eighteen. Her career then ran through every level of schooling: second grade and reading specialist work in the Diocese of Monterey, sixth grade in Salinas, high school English and ELD, speech and debate coach for migrant students, AVID instructor, instructional coach, high school and middle school assistant principal.
Her primary focus throughout was English instruction, with a particular niche in analytical composition. She taught in a densely populated, historically underserved community: children of agricultural laborers and recent immigrants who carried extraordinary potential. They were never incidental to her work. They were the very reason she taught.
In the latter years of her career she brought that depth back to a sixth-grade classroom, 2018 to 2023, straight through the pandemic, and introduced eleven-year-olds to academic language, student discourse, and analytical writing. The results are the book.
She retired on June 30, 2025, from the Salinas Union High School District. Beyond education she is a real estate investor, an author, and a patented inventor. She devoted her heart to her own children, Victor and Andrea.
Career snapshot
Thirty-one years, four levels, one throughline.
Second grade to twelfth, classroom to coaching to site leadership. The analytical composition work runs through all of it.
Philosophy
Children rise when we believe they can.
Thirty-one years produced one conclusion, and it was not about curriculum.
They rise when we give them the tools, resources and time to play with language. They rise when they know what to do and are given a plethora of options to choose from. They rise when they feel safe to make mistakes, and when it is modeled for them that mistakes are survivable.
Throughout her career Catherine believed the teacher's greatest role is not to be the loudest voice in the room, or the most directive, or even the most inspiring, but to create the conditions where students discover their own voice through the inspiration of their peers.
The child sitting in front of you will remember far more than your lesson plans.
They will remember how you made them feel, whether you believed in them, and whether your classroom was a place where they felt safe to think, to question, to make mistakes, and to find their voice.
One day, years from now, a former student may return with a story you never expected to hear. In that moment you realize the seeds you quietly planted kept growing long after they left your classroom.
What Becomes of Us
A poem, written by Catherine, that opens the book.
It sits on page three, before the career history and before a single strategy.
Your soul is the quiet center,
steady, luminous, full of possibility and imagination.
It knows more than you can name.
It moves through a shared field
where every life touches another.
Nothing stays separate for long.
We shape each other
in what we say,
how we say it,
how we act or react.
So be seen.
Offer what is true.
Let it be enough.
Speak with care and compassion.
Choose what builds, not what breaks.
What becomes of you
becomes of us.
Catherine Aguon Delacruz Martinez
Next · Scene 09
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