By Ben Joravsky
There’s a genre of education narratives that features a lone crusader who after minor setbacks achieves what everyone said was impossible: transforming a classroom of knuckleheads into high achievers. Michie’s book breaks this mold. In the tales he tells he fails almost as often as he succeeds. But there are lessons to be learned in either instance.
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From day to day he never knew what to expect. One gut-wrenching chapter recalls how a seventh-grade girl accused him of intending to molest girls on a camping trip he was chaperoning. She later admitted she had made it up because she was bitter at not being able to go on the trip. Yet he remained shaken even after his name was cleared. The incident undercut his confidence about how close he could be to students. He wondered how he could maintain his ideals in a system that seemed determined to crush idealism.
Despite it all, he became a good teacher. He learned from some of his colleagues, such as Moses Green, a six-foot-three math teacher who “while he categorically rejected gang culture, accepted the individuals who were wrapped up in it. He listened to them, he related to them as people.”
Michie gave up his full-time position at the end of last year so he could finish his graduate studies in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. However, he still volunteers at the alternative high school for dropouts he helped found in the area, and he occasionally substitutes at Seward, where he’ll lead former students reading passages from his book on October 14 in the school’s library.
“We were all very proud to come from Southie,” says MacDonald. “But the perception of Southie wasn’t the reality. The perception was that it was well-to-do and privileged and that whatever we had was better than the blacks. Our leaders and politicians fed us that line and we bought it because we needed to believe that. In fact, we lived in a ghetto.”
The protests lasted for several years, while a generation of Southie teens was destroyed. MacDonald knows dozens of kids who dropped out rather than be bused to Roxbury, where they’d be greeted by the fists and knives of angry black teenagers seeking revenge against anyone from Southie. A local gangster idolized by many brought cocaine into Southie. It hooked hundreds of kids and many died. MacDonald recalls one stretch when a week rarely went by without a teen suicide. Four of his ten siblings died young.
