In spite of his black sense of humor and unconventional teaching style, his students love him. Every year, Vosovic, 60, gets seven to nine awards for excellence in teaching from universities that ask their freshmen to identify teachers who best prepare them for their college writing courses. He gets so many award certificates that he uses them to decorate his refrigerator.

This year, he was selected by the students to speak at Homestead's graduation ceremony. He started his speech with a typical note of arrogance.

"You are about to hear a speech written by a great man," Vosovic says. "We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world."

The speech was written by Nelson Mandela.

Vosovic says he wants the students to know that they are entitled to be talented, beautiful and happy. "They don't need to be perfect to be excellent," he says.

Vosovic thinks self-confidence comes from self-knowledge, an important theme of his teaching.

"Philosophy is not that important. Literature is not that important. What makes them important is how they are related to you and your life," he says.

His curriculum reflects his belief that literature and philosophy should be a springboard to better understand oneself.

In the first semester, students read three novels--The Catcher in the Rye, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch 22.

"I teach The Catcher in the Rye as a book of relationship," Vosovic says. "The only thing worth living for is love. The only thing that can hurt you and frustrate you is love. The answer is to forgive and resiliently love again. This book teaches us about failure, commitment and love."

"One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is a battle of your individualism against the Matrix, the establishment, or the institution. Catch 22 is about making choices and dealing with the consequences of your choices," he adds.

In the second semester, students read Sophie's World and make a tapestry of "who am I?" as their final presentation.

In addition to reading, students are required to write an essay every week, based on Harold Bloom's six-step taxonomy--knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. "Give the students a structure. Then they know how to think," he says.

In fact, his entire semester follows a structure. And because his curriculum is sequential, Vosovic enforces a strict no-excuse absence policy.

"I see your signing up for this class as a 180-day commitment," he says in the syllabus of his contemporary literature class. "Make your doctor's appointment and family-time other than during this class hour."

Vosovic is so strict that at the end of one semester, a parent gave him a license plate frame saying "I am no casual teacher" as a gift. He hangs the frame on his blackboard.

"There is nothing more important than education in the world," Vosovic says. "We have to educate children so the world won't turn violent. As Bill Cosby said, we have to educate them before they get us."

Vosovic's firm belief in education came from his parents.

He was born and grew up in a farm on the border of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. His father, a first generation Serbian American, was a steelworker. "My dad wanted us to be someone special," Vosovic says. "He always said we would go to college and have a better life."

Life was difficult in the rural town where Vosovic grew up. He attended a one-room schoolhouse from the first through eighth grade. As one of the older boys in the class, he had to walk a mile to get water from the river so the class would have drinking water. During the winter, he shoveled coal into an iron stove to keep the classroom warm.

When it was time for him to go to college, Vosovic, unable to afford a university, joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps so he could go to Indiana Pennsylvania State University, a teachers' preparation school. There he met his wife of 36 years, Ann. "Larry reminded me of Rhett Butler," says Ann, an English teacher at Los Altos High School. "He had that sort of dangerous, romantic aura."

Vosovic joined the Vietnam War once he graduated from college. During the one year he served in Vietnam, he and Ann kept correspondence. "We corrected each other's letters and sent them back," Ann says. "It was English teachers' way of courtship."

While there he was injured and sent to a military hospital in Japan where he contracted hepatitis which caused him some liver damage. Just last year Vosovic won his battle with the military to pay for his war-related medical expenses.

When he returned from Vietnam in 1967, Vosovic settled down in the Bay Area. He started his teaching career at Homestead and married Ann. Between 1973 and 1994, he also moonlighted at De Anza College, teaching interpersonal communication.

It is hard to categorize what kind of teacher Vosovic is, his coworker Peter Pelkey says.

"He is a behaviorist teacher because he wants his students to behave in his way. He also can be an existentialist teacher. He wants the students to think and be responsible for their decisions," says Pelkey, a psychology teacher at Homestead. "Larry is the quintessential of every quality. He uses them when he feels like it."

His student Stephanie Erikson, whose water bottle was thrown out the window by Vosovic, says, "Vos is an arrogant, smartass and can be very annoying. But that is what makes you like him."

No matter what people say about him, Vosovic has his own theory about teaching.

"You need to have the arrogance to demand attention and to believe what you say is important but you also need to have the humility to serve," Vosovic says.

Vosovic's students can always have breakfast with him on Friday mornings.

For the past 34 years, he and Ann have had the tradition of having Friday breakfast with their students.

"It started with a group of Larry's students wanting to meet to talk about dream analysis and then more and more students wanted to come," says Ann, whose students also join Larry's students for the breakfast on Friday. "Some of the students graduated 20 years ago. Some of the students are still at school. They all end up networking."

Vosovic is also the one his students remember when everyone else gives up on them.

One of his former students who was convicted of child molestation called him from jail.

"It was difficult for me to maintain my friendship with him because he did something against everything I stood for," Vosovic says. But Vosovic wrote a letter for the student to the judge so the judge would understand his crime was not his normal behavior.

Vosovic, who will retire in three years, says the message he wants to give to all his students is simple.

"Leave the world a better place because you have been here," he says.