“You have to have a dream and pursue it. I didn’t know it was my dream. It was just fun. I went from 720 students to about 19. Cause he allowed one class he could choose outside of the five basic classes and, if you flunk one of the basic classes, you couldn’t take the class you chose. You had to go back and retake the basic class. Nothing can get a kid out of school faster than that. Kids who failed Basic Math 3 had to go back and take Basic Math 3. I went down. I couldn’t even have my Computer Math 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, which were the classes that were my mainstay. So the science advisor talked to the Superintendent, when he got him there for lunch about how selfish it was of him.
“I never saw the Superintendent talked to like that — to deprive the country of this kind of class? He said, ‘I took this kid who is programming junior level mathematics in college and I asked him every difficult question imaginable,’ and he would point to his program and say, ‘That particular problem is taken care of here; this particular problem is taken care of here.’ The guy didn’t know how to program a computer so the kid was explaining to him. Then he went to another student programming advance stuff and put him through it. … He said, ‘This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’ He asked me, how do you do it? I said, ‘Well, the students teach themselves. They find something of interest in the library and they pursue it and ask me if it is okay and I say yes. And they have to go through it and they have to write a manual on how to do their program and what it is all about. I don’t do much teaching. They teach themselves.'”