Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

Frank McCourt knows what all the bureaucrats and education professors and high-falutin’ theorists seem to forget: Teaching is an art, like jazz or basketball, a largely improvisational performance art. 

A memoir of McCourt’s thirty-year teaching career in the public schools of New York City, Teacher Man is the story of a man performing himself, five hours a day, at various venues—McKee Vocational and Technical High School, the High School of Fashion Industries, Seward Park High, Stuyvesant High School—before the world’s toughest audience: noisy adolescents, high on hormones, preoccupied mainly with food and sex, moody, suspicious and exuberant, capable of both cruelty and generosity, always full of questions: Why can’t teachers treat us like human beings? Hey, Mr. McCourt, did you ever do real work? Mr. McCourt, you ever in love? Yo, teacher man…so, you Scotch or somethin’?

McCourt is the author of two previous memoirs, Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize winning story of his impoverished Irish childhood, and ’Tis, the story of his first years in America. Like those books, Teacher Man is rich in anecdote, full of memorable characters, by turns funny and heartbreaking. 

Anyone who has spent much time in a classroom should relish McCourt’s accounts of his occasionally unconventional approaches to the teaching of English—just the sort of thing that dismays principals and delights students. There is, for example, the moment when McCourt realizes that his students’ best writing comes in their forged notes of excuse: “How could I have ignored this treasure trove, these gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity, crawthumping, self-pity, family problems, boilers exploding, ceilings collapsing, fires sweeping whole blocks, babies and pets pissing on homework, unexpected births, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages, robberies?” So he assigns his student to write an excuse note: this one from Adam to God. 

There are memorable sketches of particular students. There’s Sal and Louise, the Italian and Irish Romeo and Juliet, whose story is more complex and unsettling that anything found in a school anthology. There’s Kevin Dunne, the kid nobody wants, mysteriously troubled, pathetically grateful when McCourt busies him with classroom chores and compliments his red hair. There’s Benny “Boom Boom” Brandt, a surly black belt in karate whose Regent’s English final essay exam consists of a single word written over and over again: chirp, chirp, chirp. 

The book never becomes sentimental, too sweet or too heartwarming, because we feel the dark edges of McCourt’s own story, not just failures in the classroom—students he didn’t reach, moments when he did or said the wrong thing—but failures in life. McCourt does a doomed stint as a doctoral candidate at Trinity College, Dublin, compiling a large sackful of pointless note cards on Irish-American literary relations, but spends more time in the pub than in the library, downs too many pints, while his marriage frays and falls apart. There is the strong suggestion that for a teacher, as well as for students, the classroom can be a clean, well-lighted place, a welcoming refuge, a place of order and acceptance.  

Even after more than thirty years, McCourt can’t diagram sentence to save his soul and he never becomes the strict disciplinarian—the “John Wayne of pedagogy”—he imagines he ought to be. When he should be drilling vocabulary, he’s happily distracted by students requesting more stories about his miserable childhood. But what clearly wins the loyalty of his students is his playful but genuine respect and affection for them and their stories, for language and literature, for their work together. 

Teaching is a performance, yes, but exactly like a writer’s voice, in a classroom teacher there’s a core, something that can’t be faked. McCourt’s advice for teachers has nothing to do with technique or technology or theory: “You have to find yourself…You have to tell the truth or you’ll be found out.” In the classroom, on the page, you can’t fake who you are, not for long anyway. “If you try to hoodwink them,” McCourt rightly notes about students, “they’ll bring you down.”

At Stuyvesant, McCourt invited his students to see how they write themselves, every day of their lives. He explains that even when a boy is planning to ask a girl for a date, he’s engaged in the literary acts of plotting, of self-invention: “You’d like to go out with her. Oh, the writing now sizzles in your head. You might be one of those cool characters who could saunter up to Helen of Troy and ask her what she’s doing after the siege, that you know a nice lamb-and-ouzo place in the ruins of Ilium. The cool character, the charmer, doesn’t have to prepare much of a script. The rest of us are writing.”  

All those years in the classroom, it seems, the writing was sizzling in McCourt’s head. “Hey, Mr. McCourt,” a student shouts at him as he walks down the hall for the last time. “You should write a book.” He’s written three now, and this latest—the story of a teacher being taught, a writer finding his voice, a man finding himself—is a welcome addition to the literature of perhaps the world’s most perplexing and gratifying profession.