and said, “Wait a minute! Talk to her.
I’ll explain later.”
In fact, Mr. Goldberg went around
to all my classes and talked to all my
teachers. He said, “If you have any is-
sue with Maxie Jones, come to me.”
The next year, he did the same
thing. I met with him every day, and
he talked to all my teachers about
whatever was going on with me. Again,
he told them, “If you’ve got any prob-
lem with Maxie, come and talk to me.”
By the time I graduated from high
school, I had never missed a single
day of school.
At my graduation, Mr. Goldberg
told me, “This feels funny. I teach
tenth graders, not seniors, so I never
come to the graduation.”
“Well, why are you here?” I asked.
He replied, “Because I wouldn’t
miss seeing you graduate for anything
in the world.”
It took me years before I realized
what he had done. I graduated from
high school in the top 15 percent of
my class. I had a Regents Scholarship
and a full ride to college. The truth is,
I was always academically capable of
that. But at 15—having lost my mother
and not really seeing the value of
education—I was in line to be a sta-
tistic, a high school dropout. I realized
that the reason I showed up to school
every single day was because some-
body there was expecting to see me.
That somebody was Mr. Goldberg.
adapted from a live telling at the moth in detroit
(september 2018), copyright © 2018 by the moth,
themoth.org.
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