A Wiseacre Student, Now a Star, Was a Handful Then

CHICAGO — While Chicago beams over the meteorite success of Bernie Mac, its hometown comedian-actor ("The Original Kings of Comedy," "Ocean's Eleven") and sitcom sensation ("The Bernie Mac Show"), I watch on the screen the tall, beefy and obscenely uproarious man take possession of the camera with arachnidan eyes and the seductively bullying stage presence of the man-child I knew 30 years ago as Bernard McCullough.

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.

Fifteen years old and coming from a poor family with 10 children, McCullough had a psychologically understandable craving for individual attention, which he implemented in every way possible in my classroom of 28 students. Twenty-two years old, I was a recent college graduate with a teaching degree in English, a white suburban neophyte with lofty ideals and expectations, and zero experience in both teaching and classroom control.

Bernard sat in the rear seat of the second row in Room 180 in the cavernous school's Anthony Wing. Seating was alphabetical, but it couldn't have worked out better for McCullough, who used the last position as command center in a constant tug of war between him and me for the class' attention.

From 2:02 to 2:42 p.m. each afternoon, he kept up a nonstop barrage of jokes, jibes and extemporaneous replies, loud enough to crack up the poor pupil in front of him, and often the entire class, but out of range of my hearing. Someone would laugh, and I'd look up or turn from the board, but McCullough was always quicker on the draw, his bug eyes staring back innocently or looking up at the ceiling in a nonchalance that drew even more guffaws.

As a new instructor, I made the fatal mistake of considering the chatter and horseplay unworthy of my consideration, so I initially ignored it. A lot of rookies do the same thing, thinking that peer pressure and the importance of the learning at hand would eventually cause the distraction to go away. As all America knows, Bernie Mac did not go away.