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Holler If You Hear Me By Gregory Book Review

Holler if You Hear Me by Gregory Michie According to teacher Gregory Michie, the portrayal of urban schools in the popular media tends to have the character of either two, polarized extremes: "On one hand are the horror stories... On the other hand is the occasional account of the miracle worker" (Michie 2009: xxi). Michie's account entitled Holler if you hear me of his own experiences is Michie's attempt to offer a more balanced perspective. Michie was a public school teacher in a largely nonwhite, inner city Chicago school. He chronicles his own journey in his book, as well as those of some representative students in a series of profiles that unfold in both the first and third person.

What is particularly moving about Michie's account is his willingness to follow up with some of his students, to determine how their education continues to affect them. One boy, who seemed like a tough teenager at age twelve, at age seventeen is full of rage and withdrawn as an adolescent."As a sixth grader, Hector had seemed so grown up to me much of the time. Now, as a 17-year-old, he...

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Michie is honest about his difficulties as a teacher, noting how every day is a fight against distractions to learning, spanning from children wrangling for attention, to difficult home environments that take children's focus away from their schooling, to the pull of illegal activities and negative peer influences.
Michie grew up in an environment far different from that of his students' but he tries to view their situation with compassion. Michie says that the segregation he witnesses in the South Side of Chicago is worse than anything he had ever seen growing up in the South. Michie wrote plays as a teen; when Michie first began teaching, he was hired as a day-to-day substitute for a reading lab class where most of the students answered with "nothing" when asked what they enjoyed reading (Michie 2009: 5).

Michie initially experienced a profound culture clash between himself and his students. He wanted to be a kind, sensitive teacher who stimulated his student's interest in learning by encouraging…

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A more tragic case is Ruby, a budding young feminist in Michie's classes who became pregnant at 14 and has two children by the time he revisits her at age 17 (Michie 2009: 134). Ruby is still hopeful, but many of the students Michie encounters vow to change their lives and still fall into the negative patterns of drugs, violence, and crime that their parents and older siblings have followed. The book presents the students honestly and chronicles the teacher's failures as well as his successes. His book concludes with a review of a program designed to bring dropouts back to school, ending with a positive note. The book is both inspiring and realistic -- Michie has changed the lives of his students, but the efforts of one teacher alone are not enough to completely restructure a society in which the deck is stacked so high against the likelihood of students' success. Every day is a war for Michie to gain the student's trust and attention -- sometimes he succeeds, other times he fails.

Reference

Michie, G. (2009). Holler if you hear me. Teacher's College Press.
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