Teacher Man Christina Amato

aegis 2006

amato

McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. New York: Scribner Book Company, 2005. 258 pp.

Christina 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.”

On another occasion, McCourt inspires his English students by accident through food. On a less than successful teaching day, a student offered him a piece of homemade marzipan. When McCourt praised the treat, his class exploded into a flurry of offers for homemade specialties: kreplach and matzos, lasagna, meatloaf, kimchee (Korean hot cabbage) and various other family recipes and ethnic delicacies. The students convened class the next day in a park by the school, with a spread that attracted park goers, joggers, the homeless and even police. McCourt then turned the buffet into a class exercise by asking each of his students to bring in a family cookbook. They read exotic recipes aloud together, and eventually students brought in musical instruments and sang the recipes to the class. McCourt’s creative writing class came alive: “They tell one another this is wild, the very idea of reading recipes, reciting recipes, singing recipes with Michael adjusting his flute to French, English, Spanish, Jewish, Irish, Chinese recipes.” McCourt reflects on the days of diversion that the cookbook exercise dominated, but ultimately decides that those days were worth the small distraction from Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. McCourt shares more than humorous anecdotes about his life in the classroom, though. He reflects on the moments of deeper connection and friendship he is occasionally rewarded with in students present and past. He recounts the story of a Jewish student, Bob Stein, an eccentric, original character in McCourt’s classroom, frequently prone to philosophical outbursts in the middle of a lecture. Secretly, McCourt admired his uniqueness, but must deflect these longwinded monologues during precious class time. One afternoon, Bob announces to the class he would like to be a farmer, much to the chagrin of his prominent Jewish parents. Bob’s father, a rabbi, eventually paid McCourt a visit and entreated the teacher to side with him, to remind Bob of the disgrace he’d bring upon the family by choosing a career as a farmer, “living with pigs every day.” McCourt deftly avoided conflict with the father, apologized for his unhappiness, and Bob quickly faded from his view after graduation. When McCourt bumps into his old student six years later, the young man asked, “Mr. McCourt, you never liked me, did you?” McCourt struggled to tell Bob what he really thought, his ever-running inner monologue urging him to be honest, to “tell him how he brightened your days, how you told your friends about him, what an original he was, how you admired his style, his good humor, his honesty, his courage, how you would have given your soul for a son like him.” Mc Court related all of this to Bob, and “the high school teacher and the large Jewish Future Farmer of America” embraced there on Lower Broadway. Teacher Man is as much a tale of McCourt’s questioning, critical internal dialogue and struggle for self-validation as it is a chronicle of the trails and tribulations of teaching literature to high school students. Throughout the book, McCourt asks hard questions of his own life, plumbing the depths of his own insecurities and shortcomings, from his failed first marriage to an unsuccessful bid for a Ph.D. He is an expert, as he observes, at “the ability to examine my conscious…the gift of finding myself wanting and defective.” McCourt is painfully selfdoubting as a young man in his first years of teaching, and questions of legitimacy nag him as he stands in front of hundreds of quizzical faces each day. In these early years of his teaching career, McCourt learns that he is not only the educator, but the educated. His students teach him and guide him as well, pushing him, challenging him, and at times even encouraging him. These students are, at times in his life, McCourt’s only source of validation or worth. He reflects that while some days the teenagers infuriate him, at other times they are the only reason for getting up in the morning. It is this push and pull between frustration, disappointment and kinship and human connection that defines the world of teaching for McCourt. Teacher Man emerges as a beautiful mosaic of McCourt’s life and profession, and the lives of his students and the classroom; it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. This book celebrates the teacher and the student, with McCourt donning both masks. McCourt’s energy, passion and humor spill off the pages of Teacher Man, materializing into a worthy read.

aegis 2006