Robert Fernandez looks at home in the Half Moon Bay High School classroom where he teaches Spanish.

Being in the same classroom for 30 years and teaching at the high school for almost 40 will make a man comfortable.

His students file out and he diligently puts the lesson plans for the next class on the board, just as he has countless times before.

However, his lengthy career will come to a fulfilling conclusion when he retires later this month.

Just thinking about that day causes him to shake his head and laugh.

It seems like yesterday that he started, he says.

But the passage of four decades is evident all around him.

For one thing, the school population has more than doubled in size. When he started teaching history in 1966, the school had about 400 students and only six buildings. Now the population has tripled in size with 1,200 students.

It's changed in other ways too.

Students had more respect for teachers and authority in years past, he says. And he remembers when it was "OK" to be tough with a student.

When he attended high school while growing up in Half Moon Bay, a university education was a privilege. For many students now, it's expected, he says.

"I think excessive wealth and having too many things is not good for youth," he says. "But are the kids good? Yes, they're good."

He enjoys teaching, he says. He likes the parents, as well as the students. He can only remember one problem with an irate parent in his extensive teaching career.

Perhaps ironically, often it's the students that he has had to discipline who remember him the most. They are the ones who often return to the high school years later to see how he is doing.

He will miss the kids, he says. He will also miss the classroom. During the 30 years he has been teaching in room F6, it has become his own private space, and he would often find solace coming in on weekends or early in the morning to do work.

He has loved it. Back when he was his students' age, he realized he was destined for teaching.

For him, it was one teacher - his high school history teacher Joseph Cattarin - who inspired him to go into the field.

"He was inspirational," said Fernandez. "I was so inspired with him, I wanted to be him."

And he tried - so much so that he majored in history, with a minor in Spanish, at the University of San Francisco.

Initially he taught history at the high school while attending seminars at USF to complete his master's degree. Later he taught Spanish.

He eventually realized he wasn't his former teacher.

His old teacher was serious, he says. Fernandez liked to laugh and tell stories.

"Things went poorly for me at first because I wasn't myself," he says. "Cattarin is a very different person than me."

Subsequently, Fernandez developed his own style of teaching, attempting to make his students see that the Spanish lessons they learned in the textbooks had practical applications.

To engage his students, he would try to make his classroom lively, peppering his lectures with anecdotes or personal experience - something with which students could connect.

"You try to make the class as engaging and interesting as possible, so when they come, they come with a positive attitude," he says.

One of the ways he did this was by facilitating the school's Spanish club. Although many of his students were Mexican, he would bring in homemade traditional Spanish dishes while his students cooked, and helped fund the club through sales of bottled water in his classroom.

He also made the language come alive for his students by taking them on trips to Mexico and then later Spain during the summer.

Tours around Spain included visits to museums in Madrid, the Alhambra in Grenada, cathedrals in Barcelona, and seeing the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

"The kids saw that Spanish was not just a subject, it's a living thing," he says.

Although he will be retired, he says he still plans on going to Spain with his students in the summer.

Upon retirement, he also plans on going into real estate, recruited, in part, for his ability to speak fluent Spanish, as well as German and French.

His son, a student teacher working at Half Moon Bay High School, is applying for his job.

Fernandez is coming away from his long teaching career with many valuable lessons, he says.

He has learned that often students, and parents, can be very kind and understanding, especially when they sense that something is wrong and they can help.

If anything, he says, in almost 40 years in teaching he has learned compassion. He has learned patience and empathy, which has given him the ability to look past behaviors to the core of problems.

"You learn a little more patience. You find things out," he says. "They have so much going on in their lives."