Teacher Man

What I appreciate most about the book is its honesty. McCourt details both his successes and failures in the classroom, including the kind of embarassments most teachers would want to downplay even to those closest to them.

McCourt bemoans the fact that his teacher-training course did not prepare him at all for the realities of the classroom. But there's no-one-size- fits-all-quick-fix for teachers that you can pass on in training, and it takes time and hard-won experience to find out who you are in the classroom. (Took me years and much pain.) McCourt lays out his own personal journey for us, detailing nearly 30 years of teaching in American high-schools and eventually discovering that his stock of stories about growing up in Ireland show more was his greatest classroom resource. That and the kind of quirky imagination that dreams up assignments like getting students to write their own excuse notes and obituaries!

And empathy. Of course, empathy. What teacher can survive without it? McCourt has bucket loads of it.

I'd love to see this book made compulsory reading on all teacher training courses, but the book is a damn good read even if you don't have a particular interest in things pedagogic. It's beautifully written, moving and funny by turn.

Would you expect anything less from the author of Angela's Ashes? show less

The author of Angela's Ashes brings us his self-deprecating reflections on a 30 year teaching career. Early on, he laments that teaching-college doesn't prepare you at all for dealing with a real high school classroom. High minded theories of pedogogy don't matter if you can't get the respect and attention of a room full of teenagers that have been in school going on 12 years straight.

His constant self-doubting is incredibly human. He has story after story that recaptures the mental haze of forging his own path. His best moments didn't come because he was a genious and a natural, but because he followed his gut, took a risk, worried about it for quite some time until it finally worked out. Or didn't.

As a teacher with a thick Irish show more accent in New York City, there's a lot to be learned from his classroom stories about cultural and racial classes. Or the tension of teaching poetry to New York's future dockworkers and hair dressers. Or dealing with parents that have a very low idea of teachers.

For me, leaving construction work and grassroots organizing behind to go into teaching, this book has been more insightful than any of the classes I've taken so far. show less

If you are preparing to be, are or have been a middle or high school teacher, you should read this. Every thought Frank McCourt had in the classroom belonged to me at one time or another in the classroom during 11 years. His self deprecating humor as well as his insecurity about how he is viewed by administrators, students and parents provided assurance that this is not uncommon among teachers. His view that a teacher must to his own self be true is oh so valid. Wanting to be like the teacher in the next room who has everyone sitting up straight, teaching a black and white lesson, spoon-feeding the thoughts you want regurgitated on a test was never McCourt's style and never mine. I can really identify with Frank McCourt and am ever so show more glad I read his book. show less

Frank McCourt worked as a teacher in the New York school system for 30 years, well before he ever dreamed of writing the memoir that became a surprise best seller, Angela's Ashes. This book recounts various stories of him teaching - or, more accurately, meandering through trying to teach and make it in adulthood while constantly questioning his ability to do so.

I have to admit, it made for a bit of a tough read. Some of his descriptions of his classes and attempts to keep the class busy and out of trouble were amusing, other times I was wondering what on earth made him a "good" teacher like the jacket copy and blurbs all said. He was teaching primarily in the '60s and '70s and the book was published in 2005, so some of the descriptions show more of students' ethnicities don't age well, and one story he tells about a fat waitress he meets in Ireland is, I think, supposed to be funny but read to me as terribly cruel. And he kind of meanders through the memoir like he does through his life, spending the first 50 pages of only 250 total recounting stories of his Irish childhood that he told his classes when he didn't know what to teach them. If I didn't have to read it for book club, I wouldn't have finished it. show less

I'm conflicted about this one. His self-disgust can be tedious, even offensive. Is that right though? Do we not all question ourselves, our motives, our capabilities? I wanted him to move on, have an epiphany, get it right, stop maundering. He gives a tiny peek into the successes in his classroom, but flings the door wide to all his failures. Supposedly, he was a good teacher. I would like to know more about that and less about the sordid side he loathes. All that being said, the book was interesting and provoked thought.

This is a "real" account of Frank McCourt as a teacher. It is his deep truth. He has opened his school door and allowed us in, to experience and feel what it was to be a teacher in his shoes up in front of his class.

We learned what it was like for Frank McCourt on that first day of his first class up until his last day.

We understood and he wasn't much like the other teachers around him. He did things differently. He had a difficult time of trying to grab his students attention. When he found he had the class engaged, he went with the flow. Sometimes, having other teachers, parents and even the students wondering what the purpose of this lesson was. Even Frank wouldn't know.

Frank was not shy about telling us his story of the way it show more really happened. There were times, when I thought, if I was the author, I would have skipped "that part", just so it would make myself not look bad. Frank laid it all out on the table.

This book gave me more appreciation for all teachers. A must read for everyone. show less

This is the second work of Frank McCourt’s I’ve read (the other being Angela’s Ashes, which I read and reviewed in September of last year). And since he chooses to call both of them ‘memoirs,’ I can only conclude that the man knows what he’s talking about and is a master of the form.


McCourt is about as real a writer as I can imagine. His language is straightforward – never hackneyed, never trite – and every situation he describes seems to lift right off the page and into a reader’s eyes, ears, nose and gut.


If I think this particular memoir should be recommended reading for every teacher in the New York Public Educational system, I’m even more convinced that it should be required reading for every administrator in show more that same system. (I’m of course assuming that those teachers and administrators can be both honest and introspective enough to read the book with an open and receptive mind.)


I’ve substitute-taught, myself, in the New York Independent School system here in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in the Bronx and in Queens – and my application to teach in the public school system was twice rejected. The chief distinction in qualifying for the former and even being considered for the latter is now – if it wasn’t already – crystal clear to me after having read McCourt’s own experience of both. (Although Stuyvesant High School is not, properly speaking, part of the Independent School system, the guiding philosophy of that particular school – as we have it from McCourt, and as I know it from some of its graduates – is very much in line with that of NYC’s Independent schools.) The Independents look for passion and creativity in their respective staffs; the Publics look for obedience, strict adherence to rules, and a Master’s Degree in Education.


Please allow me a second anecdote. This one concerns a school I attended in South Florida when I was a kid….


I’d just graduated from Bayview (public) Elementary School in a section of Fort Lauderdale known as ‘Coral Ridge,’ and I was now headed off to middle – or as we called it those days – junior high school.


I ended up, quite felicitously, going to what was then billed as an “experimental” school called ‘Nova’ just west of Fort Lauderdale in a little town called ‘Davie’ and right down the road from some obsolete gravel pits. It was one of a kind in the entire U. S. At the time I entered the 7th Grade, the school had only 7th – 10th, the plan being to add 11th and 12th over the next two years, then to start building back to kindergarten and eventually to build out to a university. In other words, kindergarten through graduate school, all on one campus.


What made the school “experimental” other than what I’ve just described as its future plans? Apart from state-of-the-art science labs and foreign language instruction in several languages, both ancient and modern, starting already at the 7th Grade level, no bells or buzzers to mark the start and end of class periods; carpeted hallways; college-like lecture halls for some of the Intro to XXX classes. And the most innovative and exciting thing of all? Every student could advance at his or her own pace in a given discipline. You could – as a motivated eleven- or twelve-year-old – find yourself sharing classroom space with high school seniors.


In fact, many students went on to college at the age of fourteen or fifteen.


It was the happiest and most fulfilling year of my long academic career – and, I’d like to think, at least the germ of a start to my writing career.


My parents, for various reasons, pulled me out after one year and put me back into the public school system. Within short order, the annoying habit I’d developed at Nova of reading (rather than gabbing) while waiting in line in the lunchroom rendered me something of an apostate, but I wasn’t in school to win a popularity contest. Also within relatively short order, a science teacher put an end to my incessant questions by reminding me publicly “You’re not at Nova any longer. Rusty.”


(It wasn’t until I eventually moved to Brooklyn that I better understood the meaning of a name – which I still remember quite well – namely, his: ‘Mr. Schmuck.’)


But back to Frank McCourt’s memoir, Teacher Man. Two descriptive words occur to me immediately: ‘vivid’ and ‘compelling.’ If you have any thoughts about the state of the present educational system(s) in America – or have children of your own who may already be in one of them or are about to enter – I can’t give this memoir a high enough recommendation.


But I should let McCourt, himself, have the last word – just as he did with his students on the last day of their secondary education, and on the last day of his teaching career.


“This is where teacher turns serious and asks Big Question: What is education, anyway? What are we doing in this school? … I’ve worked out an equation for myself. On the left side of the blackboard I print a capital F, on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM.


“I don’t think anyone achieves complete freedom, but what I am trying to do with you is drive fear into a corner” (p. 253).


RRB
06/30/14
Brooklyn, NY show less