Same as It Never Was: Notes on a Teacher’s Return to the Classroom

After a decade as an education professor, Greg Michie decided to return to his teaching roots. He went back to the same Chicago neighborhood, the same public school, and the same grade level and subject he taught in the 1990s. But much had changed—both in schools and in the world outside them. Same As It Never Was chronicles Michie’s efforts to navigate the new realities of public schooling while also trying to rediscover himself as a teacher. Against a backdrop of teacher strikes and anti-testing protests, the movement for Black lives and the deepening of anti-immigrant sentiment, this book invites readers into an award-winning teacher’s classroom as he struggles to teach toward equity and justice in a time where both are elusive for too many children in our nation’s schools.

“Michie’s volume brings us back to the reality of public school teaching.”
—From the Foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“Teachers will love this beautiful book, and anyone who cares about the future of our democracy.”
—Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Michie helps us to see the successes, tensions, shortcomings, and triumphs in his own classroom and community so that we may see the extraordinary possibility of the work to be done in ours.”
—Cornelius Minor, educator and author

“Honest and compassionate.”
—Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College