McCourt’s Teacher Man is a Gem

Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes was a rare event in literature, a first book, a memoir, that won a Pulitzer for the author. However, Mr. McCourt had a “miserable Irish Catholic childhood” upon which to draw. His second book, 'Tis, described his early years in America and just isn’t as good. One wondered if the fellow had but the one book in him (many authors are one hit wonders, and that’s nothing of which to be ashamed). With Teacher Man, which recounts his time teaching in the New York Public School System, Mr. McCourt proves the first book wasn’t a fluke.

Trite as it is to say that an Irishman has a gift for words, Mr. McCourt does. He describes Eamonn de Valera, first prime minister of the Irish Free State, as “the Spanish onion in the Irish stew” thanks to a Spanish parent. “Teaching is the downtown maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back,” observes Mr. McCourt. The man can paint a picture in the reader’s imagination, and there is no writer in the world who would turn his back on that compliment.

Like many English teachers (that is, teachers of English language and literature), Mr. McCourt had visions of joining the great men and women of letters. Writing will bring fame and fortune, and teaching keeps body and soul together until the million-dollar advance check arrives. After three decades plus of teaching, he finally had time to write a book, when he had retired.

Much of his career was hampered by his own personal demons, the detritus of that miserable Irish Catholic Childhood. Fear of being found out a fraud, not wanting to climb in the hierarchy, and dealing with kids who didn’t care “a fiddler’s fart” for Byron or Shelley because they were going to be plumbers and beauticians make up much of his time in the classroom. The infamous episode in which he eats a bologna sandwich that a student has thrown sums up, for many reviewers, his efforts.

Yet, somehow, Mr. McCourt became one of the most popular teachers as one of the city’s most prestigious high schools. In a school system of 1 million kids, New York can do things most other places can’t, and its specialized high schools are better than virtually every private academy. Bronx Science, LaGuardia Performing Arts (the setting for the film “Fame), and Stuyvesant where Mr. McCourt taught have as much talent as Phillips Academy or Eton College and vastly more diversity. At these schools, the students not only want to be there, some have an innate need to be there.

In Chapters 13 and 14, Mr. McCourt describes what teaching and schools can be. As a creative, some may say nutty, teacher, he has his literature class bring in cook books and he has them read the recipes aloud. In them, they find the poetry and sensuality of food. One student breaks out a musical instrument, and the musical readings shame every coffeehouse in Greenwich Village. Did the exercise teach the rhyme schemes favored by Walt Whitman in preparation for the Regents’ Exam? No, it did something far greater. It taught them to look for the poetry in the mundane and to find the joy in it. Which is what being a teacher is really all about.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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