Looking back on Bernie Mac

The death of comedic genius Bernie Mac (Bernard McCullough) brought to mind a Chicago Tribune article written back in 2002 by David McGrath, Bernie's old English teacher at Chicago Vocational High School.

I've used this article from time to time in my ed courses or as discussion starters with fellow educators. It was an instructive piece for me, about innate but untapped brilliance in lots of inner-city kids--brilliance that isn't always apparent. You often have to dig to find it and that's really difficult in huge high schools like CVS was back when Bernard McCullough played the class clown in McGrath's classroom. 4,000-student CVS became the first Chicago high school to be restructured into smaller learning communities.

McGrath writes:

As I listen to his mishmash of South Side dialect and convoluted usage, I wonder how much of it is comically purposeful, ironically fortunate or vindictively calculated as rebellion against my efforts as his freshman English teacher in 1972 at Chicago Vocational High School on the Southeast Side. Were it the last, I could hardly blame him; for Bernie Mac became a success in this world in spite of and, possibly, because of this first-year teacher's inexperience, naivete and inability to manage the class in Room 180 in which Bernard McCullough launched a coup to become "king" of eighth-period English...

...He could have earned A's for his papers' content but always rated an F for the sentence structure and the punctuation. Always an F for the mechanics--a shortcoming I judged to be a consequence of his attention deficit (though ADD had yet to be coined), when it really may have been, instead, a manifestation of his all-consuming need for unrestrained self-expression. He was bursting back then, and there was no stopping him.

When Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald died a dozen years ago, a magazine published interviews with a few of her former teachers. Like Bernie Mac, Ella never connected with school and dropped out at an early age. "If only we knew we had an Ella Fitzgerald sitting right there in our classroom," said one of them sadly.

McGrath puts it this way:

I failed him. Not by giving him an F, but by not knowing or soon enough learning how to nurture his gifts. I think how if he had come to my class when I had three or four years of experience, I could have channeled his force into wonderful avenues of creativity and leadership. And then I think how maybe I did after all--channeled it straight out of the classroom, out of the school, out of the establishment, putting it on the stage where not 28, but 28 million can be led to laugh at themselves and forget the reality for a while.

There's never any easy, cut-and-dry lessons or answers when it comes to teaching. But I think McGrath's experience with Bernie Mac is worth some consideration.