After graduating from Lamar Tech, Dave took a teaching job for the school year of 1963-64 in the South Texas town of Hebbronville, some 50 miles from the border city of Laredo. In addition to teaching sophomore English classes, he served as the faculty advisor for the high school annual. Among his students was Manuel Flores, who would serve in the military and then attend college as a journalism major, in which field he would earn the Ph.D. Manuel would teach at Texas A & M University in Kingsville, become chairman of the Art, Communications, and Theatre Department, publish a regular newspaper column, and in 2020 have a collection of his essays, entitled Chicanadas, published by Rustik Haws LLC. Manuel was one of a number of Dave's former students who would go on to publish books. In Chicanadas, Manuel mentions the novel Lord of the Flies, which he had read in Dave's class. Although Dave greatly enjoyed both the Mexican-American students and the teachers with whom he worked, especially Adolfo "Popo" Martínez, a math instructor, he wanted to be able to teach at the college level. And so, in the summer of 1964, he returned to UT-Austin and began work toward the Masters degree. Even though he only spent one year as a high school teacher in South Texas, his experience would impact both his personal and his professional life through the interest that it awakened in him to learn more about Hispanic culture and the Spanish language.