Bruce MacDonald, principal and teacher in Weston; at 76
One day in his last years as principal at Weston High School, Bruce MacDonald was speaking with a colleague and invoked one of the pope's titles: servant of the servants of God.
"And he said, 'That's what we do, we're servants of the teachers of kids,' " said Bob Desaulniers, who was Mr. MacDonald's assistant principal for two years.
Lofty and practical, Mr. MacDonald's paraphrase captured an approach to education that earned him immense respect and, occasionally, some sharp criticism during a 45-year career as a teacher and administrator. Diagnosed a few years ago with dementia, Mr. MacDonald died in his sleep March 26 in the German Centre for Extended Care in West Roxbury. He was 76 and had lived in Chestnut Hill.
"He said, 'Teaching is the real priesthood,' and he really lived that in his life, creating a community in his classroom where no one is ever left out," said his wife, Alice. "He just loved students, and he loved the experience of bringing ideas alive."
With a commanding voice and physical presence, he cut an imposing figure in front of a classroom or leading meetings.
"He was a tall man and very trim, very fit - no soft belly or love handles on Bruce," said Daniel S. Cheever Jr., who is president emeritus of Simmons College and was superintendent of schools in Weston when he appointed Mr. MacDonald to be principal. "And there were no unnecessary words in his grammar. He was all nouns and verbs - no need for adjectives and adverbs for Bruce."
In the Weston school system, where he worked from 1966 until 1994, Mr. MacDonald rewarded students who fell outside traditional spheres of recognition. At graduation, he handed out what he called mensch awards for accomplishments as varied as cleaning up after dances or planting bushes around the school.
"Every person who comes up to get an award doesn't have a halo," he told the Globe in 1993. "There will be two or three students who will go away with a bushel basket of awards, which they have earned. But there's been an effort within the department to broaden the range of awards they give. There has been more recognition of effort, as well as achievement."
Mr. MacDonald also insisted that those in the lowest jobs be treated with the same respect as top administrators. He was known for coining aphorisms, one of which was: "It is better to insult the school superintendent than a secretary or a custodian."
As an educator, he believed schools were a place to cultivate critical thinking, said his son, Jaime of Roslindale. Mr. MacDonald's colleagues spoke of how he would engage them in Socratic dialogue, encouraging all to wrestle with gray areas in a world that preferred black and white answers.
"In education he was an unconventional thinker," his son said. "He would create these amazing true-false quizzes in which there was no right answer. They were kind of a dialectic in which each position contained more than a grain of truth and could be the impetus of a great debate."
Mr. MacDonald grew up in rural Gerry, N.Y., a few miles north of Jamestown. On his first day at college, an extension campus of Alfred University, he met Alice Dewing, who was working at the bookstore where he went to buy textbooks.
"It really was love at first sight," she said. "I was just thrilled with him."
They married in August 1953, after he graduated from Alfred with a bachelor's degree in history. Mr. MacDonald received a master's in English literature from the university two years later and spent a few years as an instructor at the college before switching to teaching at high schools in New York State and Arizona.
He had grown up in a fundamentalist family, his son said, and always wrestled with his relationship to religion.
"His whole life was a search," his wife said. "He was searching for a belief system that he could subscribe to, and he didn't ever find it."
Nevertheless, Mr. MacDonald regularly attended Grace Episcopal Church in Newton, where the Rev. Jim McAlpine, a retired rector, said that "as I got to know him, I got to realize that Bruce was what I call a fearless thinker . . . one who is always ready to challenge any sentimental notions about God or the church. He was serious about it, but he wouldn't tolerate little pithy, pious remarks that a lot of people make when going to church."
In the Weston school system, Mr. MacDonald also had served as the English curriculum director and dean of the secondary faculty, his son said, although he continued to teach at least one class each year.
Near the end of his tenure, Mr. MacDonald's willingness to speak plainly and forcefully prompted some parents to ask that he retire before his planned departure in 1994.
A parents' group was angered by a letter he wrote criticizing the behavior of some students, including three black males from Boston who attended Weston High School through the Metco program. Mr. MacDonald declined to step down early, and the School Committee supported his decision in a 4-0 vote, with one abstention.
Five years after retiring, he spent a year as interim principal of Andover High School while it conducted a search for a new principal. Lamenting the changes in education since he last led a school, Mr. MacDonald wrote occasional columns for the Globe's Learning section.
Concerns about potential violence in schools and the increased focus on standardized testing were among the things he felt took too much time from the obligation to teach students how to think clearly and write well.
"I recently squandered a faculty meeting by demonstrating some strategies for focusing student attention on a piece of writing," he wrote for a Globe column in May 2000. "At the end of the session, a veteran union representative declared that he had never before been in a faculty meeting where a principal had talked about teaching. I feel the pain of the late Rip Van Winkle."
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. today in Grace Episcopal Church in Newton. 