Once my teaching route took the road less traveled, I encountered unique offers and opportunities to go further off-trail. In my memoirs I will explain the circumstances under which I taught:

• In "Completely individualized classrooms" teaching from September until June, without ever addressing the entire group. No rule, I just spoke to individuals and never had occasion to speak to the group.
• In regular classes for many years without giving an F to any student on anything, ever. Once I believed the alternative to flunking kids was teaching them—I learned to teach them. The key lies in utilizing the kids responsibility for their own learning
• In a self-imposed goal of teaching a 100% of the kids, 100% of the required material, to 100% proficiency—I don’t always make it; but I always try. Doing so requires complete individualization and democratic relationships for a classroom community of learners. I can’t “teach” at 100% level; but kids can “learn” at that level.
• In a junior high civics class of 527ninth-graders in an auditorium for a year. It was the best class I ever taught primarily because I was terrified of “losing control”. I learned that I couldn’t “control” 527 kids by typical methods such as eye contact, stern looks, threats, pop-quizzes, grades, detention notices, notes to parents, or any other fear and intimidation procedures. I couldn’t control classes of 25 students either, except for the students’ willingness to control themselves in relation to my teaching.
• In a Completely individualized math class of 93 seventh graders, in a modified three-room sized classroom. I put the final exam from last year’s class on the board, as the goal. I made available materials including self-scored diagnostic tests, and gave the freedom to work together and at their own speed. I worked only with individual students. Students who accepted the goal were eager to utilize any resource. My job was mainly to assist the others in accepting the goal.
• In a "wild, innovative school” where teaching teams eliminated the halls, walls, bells, classes, grades, report cards, textbooks, schedules, and curriculum. The junior high used a teacher-controlled, variable, flexible schedule that changed daily. The school was completely individualized with students having responsibility for their own schedules, plans, progress, and learning.
• In a school district with 10,000 teachers, in a district with 300 teachers, and districts in-between. Within those districts, I taught in schools that ranged from a stereotype “ghetto” school to the “best school”, where the average student was two years above grade level and 95% went on to college. The sixth largest district in the U.S. used a policy book a foot and a half thick. I had to make a crucial decision. If I followed policy, I couldn’t teach; if I taught, I couldn’t follow policy. I succeeded by learning to out-bureaucrat the bureaucrats, using their rules against them.
• In a federal research project I taught the lowest level students on the premise: “The kids achievement problem isn't because of what's wrong with them; it's what the school is doing to them.” Subsequently, I taught 32 teachers to replicate the program in sixteen “ghetto type” schools. I continued teaching teachers the methods for years.
• In demonstration classes at The Kennedy Child Study Center for a joint project for Peabody College, Metropolitan Nashville Schools, Model Cities Project, and Central Midwest Regional Educational Laboratory—(CEMREL). From eight schools, using two teachers as a team to teach the 60 “bottom students” in their respective junior high, middle, and elementary schools, I took the most difficult kids in a two-way mirrored classroom to demonstrate defective teaching-learning procedures.
• In summer Courses for the University of California, Extensions at San Diego, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Davis for 27 years consecutive years. My specialty was teaching teachers to individualize classes, shift their roles from taskmasters to resources, and shift from teacher-centered instruction to child-centered learning. I taught fourteen different three-credit courses including, “Getting the Kids to Make Their Own Materials”, “The Creative Classroom”, and “Mastery Learning”.
• In special education classes ranging from “trainable mentally retarded” in a sheltered workshop, to learning disabled, and groupings of at-risk kids, designated as the “kids at the bottom of the achievement gap”, or “the kids who can’t, don’t or won’t even try to learn, follow procedures or behave.”
• In three independent psychological services organization doing private tutoring in individual subjects and in training tutors. My approach dealt with student attitude, teacher attitude, student-teacher relationship, and students taking their own responsibility—all as keys to remediation. My relationship to the tutee was the model.
• In setting up and supervising an entire K-6 elementary school on ungraded, open concepts.
• In a psychiatric hospital for a year and a half.

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