Is The Theme Of See You When We Get There By Gregory Michie

A picture of the teacher as a passionate, dedicated advocate for students is the one that was painted by Gregory Michie in See You When We Get There: Teaching for Change in Urban Schools. Michie presented the teachers in his books as individuals who needed to work tirelessly to overcome obstacles that the students and the teachers confronted. The teachers strove to overcome these obstacles because doing so was what they thought was in the best interests of their students.
See You When We Get There tells the story of five Chicago teachers and their students as presented by Michie. He works to illustrate what he believes to be the most honest view of the way these individuals succeed and fail in their daily lives in urban schools. Michie

This ability created both student interest and student buy-in. Toni Billingsley did this in her Spanish classes by being lively and non-stop in her teaching. Billingsley strived to make connections between course content and student lives, as she did once by examining the impact of AIDS on Latin America and their school’s community. In Cynthia Nambo’s science class, students had to determine which research proposals deserved funding, and their choices were affected by their individual values, which were respected in Nambo’s classroom. This was part of a strategy meant to demonstrate to the girls in her class that they were important. Nancy Serrano always had her students reading and writing about current events, making it relevant to their lives. I think the necessity of being culturally relevant was said best by Serrano herself: “I want them to see the bigger picture…I want them to question, to understand themselves in this world, to understand why things are the way they are, and be able to use that to overcome whatever they need to overcome” (Michie, 2005, p.

In this view, the teacher must have high expectations for the work of the students. These clearly high expectations can be seen in the teachers’ own words, but more important, I would argue that it is demonstrated by the challenging (requiring deep thinking) tasks that these teachers presented to their students. To be successful students in each of the classes in the book, a student had to work and put in effort. Passivity did not appear to be acceptable in any of these