After 32 years of teaching with 15 of those at Saratoga High, English teacher Amy Keys is retiring in June.
Keys became an integral part of the school in those years and will leave a lasting legacy of excellence in all aspects of her job. She has been the recent English department head, a beloved English 11 Honors teacher and the adviser to Soundings Literary and Arts Magazine.
Keys took over a struggling Creative Writing class later in her teacher career and grew it into a thriving elective that attracts a full classroom of learners every year, with some of the students signing up for multiple years in a row.
Administrators also chose her to lead the school’s effort to gain accreditation through Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) — a world-renowned agency that certifies the quality of educational institutions in the western US — in 2020. In the 2020-21 school year, Keys was recognized as the District’s Teacher of the Year by her SHS colleagues.
Teaching wasn’t on her radar screen at first
It will hardly be a surprise to anyone who knows her energetic teaching style that she was once a theater arts major. Keys attended Northwestern University to study theater as an undergrad. When she realized theater was too limiting for her future plans, she recognized that her passion for theater was more deeply due to her appreciation of storytelling, expression and writing.
Unsure of what to do for a career, she recalled her senior year in high school when she spent the year in Germany. There, she learned to speak German and discovered her passion for language — specifically language acquisition, expression and communication.
As a result, she traveled abroad to Germany during her junior year in college and she switched her major to a BA in German Language and Literature at Northwestern University. However, after graduating in the early ‘90s, she was still unsure about her ultimate career path.
At first, she thought she did not want to be a teacher. After all, her father was a longtime high school English teacher in Wisconsin, and she thought it would be too cliché to follow her father’s footsteps. Despite her resistance, everyone she knew encouraged her to become a teacher, reassuring her that she would be a great mentor and love the job.
Keys decided to move to Belmont, California, where she landed a job at the International Students of English (ISE), a language school part of the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she taught the English Second Language (ESL) class. Discovering that the job was both fascinating and exciting, she decided to travel abroad to Indonesia to teach English there.
“I discovered that teaching was so much harder than it looked and also so exciting in that it just really draws you in,” Keys said. “You really can’t think of anything else; it kind of obliterated so much else. At the same time, it connects you to so much outside of yourself and so many people.”
After teaching English Language Development (ELD) for two years, she said she was “bitten by the teaching bug.”
Keys decided to shift away from teaching ELD and instead teach English in public high schools, traveling back to the United States to earn her teaching credential at San Francisco State.
Since the English curriculum focuses on teaching language, literature and language arts, she was able to teach literature and writing at a higher level compared to EDL.
By 1994, she started teaching at George Washington High School in San Francisco. After she got married, her husband went to graduate school in Wisconsin, so she traveled there, received her master’s degree at Viterbo University and taught for a few years. Then, she came back to California for her husband’s work. By that point, she had been teaching for 10 years in public high schools while also raising their two young sons.
For the next four to five years, Keys decided to become a Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) Mentor at Santa Cruz and North Monterey County to advise newer teachers. She went around different classrooms in the area, giving feedback and helping aspiring teachers figure out how to craft lesson plans and engage students in classrooms.
Keys’ journey in education landed her at SHS in 2011 after she started to miss having her own classes to teach. She heard about the school from English teachers Suzanne Herzman and Natasha Ritchie.
“I thought [Saratoga] sounded like a fantastic school to be at,” Keys said. “There are internationally and culturally diverse students who come really ready to learn and really eager to learn.”
To her students in the years since, Keys was more than a teacher — she built memorable connections with her students. Senior Jack Dong, currently one of her TAs, had Keys for English 11 Honors last year and is a submissions editor for Soundings this year. He said he values how Keys focused on nurturing a deep connection with her students.
“I love how she regularly checks in on all of her students about their progress, deadlines or just life in general,” Dong said. “Throughout my interactions with her, it just feels like I’m making a deep and human connection with a mindful and wise adult — something very precious to any teenager.”
Dong especially enjoyed class discussions that became deep and collaborative. He said Keys really knew how to regulate a good in-class discussion that allowed students to make discoveries about the works they were reading. He recalls how sometimes, the bell would ring, and no one would immediately pack up because they were so invested in deep analysis of works like F. Scott Fitgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or “Hamlet.”
Future plans and goals
For Keys, when asked about her favorite memory of being a teacher at the school, she said she had a hard time choosing. She said it seemed like students gave her a memorable experience nearly every day.
Among her favorite memories were being with students who worked on Soundings magazine; watching students dive deep into creative writing lessons; sharing fun times with her colleagues; dancing together in teacher quad days or doing flash mobs — zombie flash mobs; going to students’ track meets and chaperoning prom while dancing with the students and colleagues — who are some of her best friends.
During retirement, Keys plans to travel the world with her husband Steve McKay, a sociology professor at UCSC who is going on a sabbatical in the future and will also retire in the next few years. She plans on traveling to Southeast and East Asia, along with visiting her parents and adult children more often. Keys also aims to volunteer to coach Mock Trial, help out at local libraries and contribute in other similar places for her community in Santa Cruz.
Keys notes that she will miss her students and colleagues and plans on keeping in touch with them during retirement.
“Teaching together is a special kind of building something together, and I’ll miss the excitement and the reward of that,” Keys said. “I’ll miss that when you have engaged, curious, young people in your life, you’re continually re-evaluating and relearning and re-experiencing the world from so many different perspectives, and that’s an unrivaled privilege that I’ve enjoyed.”
Amy Keys • May 30, 2026 at 11:54 pm
Even if I weren’t personally honored by the time the journalist Claire Hou had put into this piece, I would still be struck by the cohesion, comprehensiveness, and skilled voice of her writing!