McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. New York: Scribner Book Company, 2005. 258 pp. Christina Amato
aegis 2006 110 amato
Anyone familiar with the writing of Frank McCourt will welcome his latest chapter in the story that continues to fascinate and inspire readers: the chronicles of McCourt’s own life, both his moving personal trials in Ireland and the United States, and his struggles to break the emotional shackles of crushing childhood poverty. Teacher Man will not disappoint, as McCourt’s insight and comic wit shine in this account of his thirty years as a high school English teachers. McCourt seems to pick up where he left off in Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis, framing his teaching experience in the public schools of New York City with the same colorful, vibrant narrative that won him acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize. In Teacher Man, McCourt explains why he was a “late-bloomer, a johnny-come-lately” to literary renown and fortune (he was sixty-six when Angela’s Ashes was published); he answers the persistent questions of critics and fans, who demand to know where McCourt was all of the years he was not sharing his amazing story with the world. He replies simply, “I was teaching, that’s what took me so long.” From there, Teacher Man soars with McCourt’s reflections on the rewards, complexities, intricacies, limitations and at times chaos of the “downstairs maid of professions,” teaching. McCourt’s narrative is born of firsthand experience in the trenches, from his first teaching position in an elite public high school. His first years as an educator are riddled with the agonies and occasional joys of being embroiled in the world of adolescents. He vividly recounts his struggles to coexist peacefully with the hundreds of hormonal, temperamental teenagers that he is assigned to educate daily, the children of mechanics and dock workers who exhibit little interest in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Because he wrests little control from the unruly students in the classroom, McCourt lapses into his true art, storytelling. All through the remaining years of his teaching career, McCourt’s students beg for stories of his wretched childhood in Ireland, pacified only when he exhausts his stories of miseries and misfortune. McCourt teaches at four different public schools in New York during his career, ranging from the poorest, most under-funded facilities, to the famed Stuyvesant High School, where both McCourt and the students are encouraged to let their creativity flourish. Whatever school McCourt teaches at, one similarity resonates: his students recognize him for the expert storyteller he is. McCourt’s tales become the thread of connection binding him to these teenagers; they learn to respect him for his perseverance, his triumph over unfathomable poverty, and they capitulate when McCourt asks them in exchange to open their minds to the study of literature and creative writing. The lives of McCourt’s students both inside and outside the walls of his classroom come to life and radiate with the author’s empathy, insight and keen eye for humor even in the most unusual circumstances. McCourt relates one instance in which he paraded his literature class, consisting of twenty-nine unruly girls and two boys, from McKee Vocational High School in the Bronx, to Long Island in order to see a college production of Hamlet. His students had demanded they be allowed on the field trip, after seeing flyers that other classes were attending. None of his students had ever seen a live performance before, and became so terrified, excited and disorderly at the sight of Hamlet’s ghost father, that the student actor had to remove his hat to show that he was in stage makeup and just an ordinary college student. The twenty-nine girls of McCourt’s class then “gasped and complained the whole play was a trick especially that phony ghost up there and they promised they’d never go to a phony play like this again.”
