For close to three centuries — before New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912 — the state's school system developed and transformed under the governance of three different flags. Education in the state was heavily influenced by the various cultures, the impact of the Catholic church, and political upheaval and corruption.

Missionaries and their wives often served as teachers from the 1600s through the 1800s, imparting their version of the "3 Rs" — reading, writing and religion — on students, often with the purpose of Christianizing Native Americans of all ages. "Little is known about their qualifications as teachers except that they were religious and knew the English language," authors John B. Mondragón and Ernest S. Stapleton note in their 2005 history, Public Education in New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press). The state's School Code of 1860, for instance, simply specified that people who wanted to teach had to prove they could read and write. Fortunately, the state requires a bachelor's degree and teaching license these days.

Over 400 years, curriculum has changed as technological advances continue to make computers, SMART boards and document cameras as necessary as pencil and paper in the classroom.

But one element that has remained consistent over the years is the passion and dedication of teachers. Just 40 teachers were listed in the 1840 state census. Today, New Mexico has about 21,000 teachers budgeted for the 2010-2011 school year. Santa Fe Public Schools employs roughly 900 teachers.

This is the story of three of them.

"This is the most exciting profession in the world," — Fernando Morales.

Around 1:40 p.m. every day the fourth-graders in Fernando Morales' portable classroom at César Chávez Elementary School look at the clock on the wall. They're anticipating story time at 2 p.m., which Morales uses to "promote the love of reading."

"I'm trying to share my love of learning with them," he said.

It's paying off. He got a beautiful note from one of his kids two Mondays ago, which read, "Thank you for the best first day of school I ever had." Just this week, another student said to him, "This year I like coming to school every day!"

Morales likes coming to school, too. This is his fifth year. He started out in college studying pre-law, until the enthusiastic teaching style of a professor at New Mexico Highlands University — Daniel Holguin — inspired him to change course. Morales had already applied to The University of New Mexico's law school in 2005. He still has the university's response letter, although he said, "I have not opened it to see if I was accepted or not."

Instead he got his teaching degree at the College of Santa Fe and started at César Chávez as a second-grade teacher. His family isn't surprised: His late grandma, Ruth L. Dominguez, taught in a three-room schoolhouse in Chamisal back in the 1950s, and both his mother, Yolanda Morales, and his father, Gene Morales, still work as educators in Albuquerque Public Schools.

Plus he has "cousins, aunts, siblings" who teach — all but one in New Mexico. His wife, Amy, teaches fifth grade at César Chávez.

His grandmother told him stories of teaching in the old days. Some things have changed; others have not. "I've thought about the past," he said. "It would have been interesting to be teaching in not necessarily a slower paced time, but a time when you relied on the old pencil and paper. I think there was a lot more creativity in the school room 50 or 100 years ago."

His classroom is filled with books, colorful objects, maps, animal figurines and an energetic lizard in a glass cage (one student said it is a gecko; another claims it is a gila monster. Either way, nobody tries to pet it.)

He encourages parental involvement but doesn't blame parents for kids' academic failure: "A lot of parents are working two jobs just to survive." But he still recalls his own worst day at school: "A kid showed up with evidence that she was being beaten by her stepmother. She couldn't concentrate that day. She spent 80 percent of the day crying. But she was much safer at school than at home, so she stayed here."

He's in his early 30s, and wants to teach until he retires. "To me, it's a very noble profession, to be able to make a difference in the lives of these children," he said.

He runs into former students who remember him, who run up to him and hug him and tell him about their most recent academic achievements.

"They tell me how proud they are that they got an 'A' on a test," he said. "They still want you to be proud of them. And I always want to be proud of them."

"I want them to follow in my footsteps." — Christina Lujan

It's 1 p.m. or so in the gym at Nava Elementary School, and the Cookie Monster is loose. He's hungry, and he'll happily gobble up the other first-graders in physical education teacher Christina Lujan's gym class.

Lujan knows that a lot of people think she's got it made. After all, she doesn't have to grade homework or keep the kids quiet during a math test. But it's not always easy to corral 30-some students and engage them in a coordinated athletic exercise — although the first-graders do like playing the catch-and-evade game of Cookie Monster. When that class leaves, she shifts gears, working with sixth-graders to teach them the proper technique behind football.

Lujan, 46, stays on her feet for seven or eight class periods in a row (minus a 30-minute lunch break). She taught at Ortiz Middle School for five years before transferring to Nava. One day an English teacher at Ortiz said to her, "You have it so easy."

"And then he had to take over my class one day," Lujan recalled. "He came back exhausted and said, 'I was wrong. I couldn't even take roll.' "

A graduate of Santa Fe High and a long-distance runner, Lujan received a cross country scholarship at Navajo Community College (now Diné College) in Tsaile, Ariz. She earned her bachelor's and master's at New Mexico Highlands University. She started teaching P.E. at Capshaw Middle School in 1990.

Lujan's great-grandfather was superintendent of Union County, N.M., up Clayton way, back about 90 years ago. Her great-aunt, Amalia Castillo Bernal, raised Lujan's mother, Alice — both women became teachers.

Bernal ran the typical one-room school house in Colfax County, in northeastern New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. "She was everything: the principal, the teacher, even the janitor," Lujan said. "My mother would go with her to school early to build a fire to keep the school house warm."

These women taught Lujan a valuable lesson about her trade: "You won't make much money. It's hard. You have to love what you do."

In this day and age, Lujan said, a teacher must double as counselor, disciplinarian, parent, friend and even confidante.

"You have to be everything to them," she said. "I try to be a positive role model."

Parents don't usually come by to talk to her during parent/teacher conferences; they're not that concerned if their child is failing gym class. But Lujan said she's rarely wrong when it comes to correlating how children are doing in her class with their academic standing in other areas.

"I can tell which kids do well in the classroom and which do not," she said. "I'll see the other teachers in the lounge and say, 'He can't read, can he?' They'll say, 'How did you know?'

"Because he can't skip. You can tell by how they pay attention, how they follow the rules, how they move."

She stresses cooperation, not competition, in sports. "For me, it's not about winning or losing, it's about exercise," she said. "I want them all to feel comfortable when they are exercising and not feel like they're bad at P.E."

She bemoans the lack of physical activity that children get outside of school today. Too much TV, not enough play time, she thinks. Technology keeps kids glued to video and computer screens way too much, in her view.

She understands why people think the school system is failing their children, but she also believes it's not an entirely accurate picture. "Nobody gives us credit for what their kids are learning," she said. "And I don't think tests are a good measure of success. I know kids who are doing well in school but perform badly on tests."

"I'm proud of what I do. My passion is being active, and I want my kids to share that passion. The best thing about this is having contact with the kids, being there for them. I want them to follow in my footsteps."

"You'll learn life ... in physics class." — Anita Nugent (Gerlach)

She's 66 years old and stands just over 5 feet tall, and she's wearing a crazy contraption on her head that's made out of an old wire hanger and a pair of small weights. It looks like the outline of a court jester's crown, and as she turns in a circle under it, and it remains stationary, it demonstrates the theory of inertia to her class.

She tells her students that knowledge of science can come in handy as she teaches them about displacement — the difference between the initial and final destination of an object or person.

See, if Mom and Dad ground you for the weekend, but you sneak out when they're not looking and take the car to the mall and then come back and park the car exactly where it was when you started, and they ask if you went anywhere while they were gone, you can truthfully tell them that your displacement was zero.

"All that hoopla about kids and how awful they are — nonsense," Anita Nugent (formerly Gerlach) explained. "If you respect them and gain their respect, you can make it work."

She's Texas-born. Her uncle and aunt were educators around Eastland, Texas, in the 1940s; he worked into the 1990s. Her cousins are educators in Texas to this day. She's going on 50 years of teaching — or about an eighth of Santa Fe's 400 years. She's been teaching in New Mexico for 25 years.

And boy have things changed since her early days: "When I started, the emphasis was on the three Rs. Students got one elective a year — maybe. Everyone had to take P.E. The female teachers had to wear skirts, the men had to wear shirts and slacks — and no facial hair allowed. And those horrible Ditto (copy) machines!"

Back then, a teacher's starting salary was about $3,000 a year, she said. Still, she could afford a down payment on a $21,000 custom-built house in a private subdivision. Now a starting teacher earns $30,000 in his or her first year.

"But you're not going to buy a house like that today — not for $21,000," she said.

She knows that today's students have short attention spans thanks to the fast-paced world of media. So she looks for ways to engage them, adding a theatrical flair (she's a former dancer) to her methods.

Yet she's not sure she would have wanted to be a teacher here 100 years or so ago. "They watched your private life in a way that we watch the private lives of our politicians today, and that was probably even more true in a small town," she noted.

"Even when I started teaching in the high school, I had to sign a moral turpitude contract, saying that if anything in my private life led to questions about my morality, I could lose my licensure for teaching." Then, too, female teachers generally could not marry in the 1800s and even early 1900s, she said.

But she suspects students had a better chance of acquiring a good background education then because teachers, "didn't have to cover so much ground, and students today have to learn a lot more than what we had to learn in school."

Teachers work harder than most people realize, she said: "You take your job home with you, and you also take home the hearts of your students."

Facebook keeps her in touch with a lot of former students. At 47 years of teaching, with an average of 120 students a year (a low figure, she maintains), she figures she's seen 6,000 students pass through her classroom.

"Not only do we touch the kids' lives, they touch ours," she said. "I still love the kids. I can't imagine teaching if you don't love your students. They keep you young."

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.