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About the Author, Duane F. Smith
The Author’s unusual background and life experiences provide a unique perspective on reaching the unreachable, and the dropout dilemma. Having being born dyslexic, he found school a challenge. Barely finishing high school, left to join the Army. There he was to experience a life-changing event…teaching in an experimental program prepared by the University of Maryland, for adults considered illiterate, therefor not eligible for military service. This experience left him convinced there was a better teaching method than the one-size-fits-all Socratic Model, ubiquitous to education.
After the Army, he went to Ashland, Oregon, to renovate old houses into college rentals. Meanwhile, in an attempt to understand why school had been so difficult, he enrolled in a psychology class at what is now Southern Oregon University. Eventually, he received a Master’s Degree with an emphasis on early childhood development. A few years later when no money was available for building apartments he decided to teach for a year or two. While not sure if it teaching was his life’s work, he hoped to see if he could find a better way to work with kids who struggled in school, than he had experienced in his schooling.
Here, he met Henry O. Pete, an extremely innovative school superintendent. They soon united in their belief that schools could do better. Together they developed an experimental program, putting their theories into action in an experiment where 4th through 6th graders worked at their own pace and in their areas of interest.
When the superintendent was hired to be the founder of a Community College based on their same experimental theories, Duane whjile invited, decided not to follow and left teaching to go back to his business. Then, after 40 years of follow-up on students from their experiential program, he began writing about what they had learned.
Renegade Teacher is about what worked in the classroom and what didn’t. Then, he wrote Renegade Class, the story of what became of the kids from that program over the next 40 years. Today, he is working on a handbook and guide for kids who struggle in school, and adults who care.
Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
Duane Smith is the renegade teacher referred to in the title. His own schooling had been less than an optimal experience due to learning difficulties, and he ended up in the Armed Forces after several failed attempts at college. While there, he was assigned the task of teaching fellow soldiers who had never been to school, using a highly efficient and unusual learning system. Intrigued by those students' successes, Smith became a teacher, albeit an extremely unusual one. His classroom was not at all what other teachers or the principal considered an appropriate environment for learning. Fortunately, Henry, the school superintendent, shared Smith's vision of experiential learning and offered him a class consisting of students that the other teachers could not handle or reach. "Renegade Teacher" is a series of vignettes about Smith's class and the students he worked with.
I think anyone who reads this book will probably be wishing he or she had been lucky enough to land in Mr. Smith's class. The pictures spread throughout "Renegade Teacher" show students who are involved, active and having a great time. There are no rows of children sitting quietly with their hands folded neatly on their desks as one finds all too often in traditional classroom settings. The results are shared in this funny and heartwarming memoir by Duane Smith, written 40 years after the fact. I found this book hard to put down and sat up all night reading it with a smile on my face. It is a great story, and it is written in an engaging conversational style, which, combined with the classroom's and students' photos, almost made this reader feel as though he were there. I highly recommend "Renegade Teacher" and will be looking for the sequel.
