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This review has been accessed times since June 24, 2007

McCourt, Frank. (2005). Teacher Man: A Memoir. New York: Scribner. Pp. 272     $15 (Paperback) ISBN 0-7432-4378-1         $26 (Hardcover) ISBN 0-7432-4377-3

Reviewed by Jeffrey J. Rozelle
Michigan State University

June 24, 2007

The popular media often embrace teachers as protagonists who act as agents of change, often radical, within schools and children’s lives. Frequently, these teachers are outsiders in some way, not bound by the conventional norms of school and so better able to resist traditional school practices. To Sir with Love (Braithwaite, 1959) and Educating Esme (Codell, 2001) stand among a long line of written narratives in popular culture about outsiders who come into schools and create change. Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver (Menendez, 1988) as the computer engineer who pushes low-income Hispanic students to pass the Calculus AP exam, ex-marine Louanne Johnson in Dangerous Minds (Smith, 1995) who manages to whip street-smart kids into place, and even Tom Berenger’s murderous mercenary character in The Substitute (Mandel, 1996) who cleans up an inner-city school of drug dealers (albeit with guns): each movie suggests that an interesting teacher must be one who, against all odds, battles the forces of the status-quo. Each of these examples, and there are many more, suggest that the life of an ordinary teacher, who struggles to do his or her job each day, does not make for an interesting story. In Teacher Man, Frank McCourt writes a different sort of tale – one that captures the complexity of teaching, while exposing the frailty of the teacher’s identity that rest at the heart of the difficult work of teaching. And he does it in a way that portrays the daily life of a teacher as compelling, interesting, and realistically complicated.

McCourt, though born in America, spent most of his childhood in Ireland, which he chronicled in Angela’s Ashes (1996). Teacher Man, however, begins in 1958, after McCourt has immigrated to the U.S. and has begun teaching in New York City. It details his thirty-year career as a high-school English Teacher in New York City Public Schools. McCourt’s writing style is more stream-of-consciousness than poetic, but this works well to convey the hectic, chaotic, almost random, nature of the way teachers think. The opening paragraph captures perfectly the tone of the book - sometimes hilarious, sometimes melancholy, and always filled with self-doubt:

On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long. (p. 11)

So begins the tale of his long career, intertwined with the stories of his life outside teaching, flashbacks to his childhood in Ireland, and his years in college preparing to be a teacher.

One of the great strengths of this book is the way that it captures the complexity of schools and the work of teachers. Many of the classical teacher dilemmas are present here: to convey content or connect with students; balancing the power one holds over students with a desire for relationship with them; and negotiating with the constraints of an institution like school that values the security that conformity brings while striving to create something new within the classroom. Because McCourt lets us into his thoughts as he moves through these choices, we see the complex set of decisions that he must make as he learns to teach.

Frank McCourt

McCourt’s initial teaching assignment was at McKee Vocational and Technical High School in Staten Island; most of his students had few aspirations for college and were children of working-class parents. Teaching English, and especially writing, to these students resulted in lots of resistance. Writing just did not seem relevant to his students. But they could all write excellent forged excuse notes. McCourt described his desk drawer where he kept these: "[It] was filled with samples of American talent never mentioned in song, story or scholarly study. 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? Here was American high school writing at its best—raw, real, urgent, lucid, lying." (p.85)

Building on these talents, he designed a set of writing assignments around these “gems of fiction,” which end with students writing an excuse for some of the most notorious bad guys in history. This, of course, is the day the Superintendent of Schools makes a surprise inspection of his classroom and witnesses students conjuring up passionate defenses for Judas and Al Capone. He finally had engaged his students in something they could relate to, something they cared deeply about, but it came at great risk to him as it stretched the boundaries of what might be considered normal teaching.

From that example, one might picture Teacher Man as similar to the books and movies described in this review’s opening paragraph, where the teacher is heroic and rises above the constraints of school. But McCourt is brutally honest about his own failures and the toll that these failures take on him as a man. After a troubled one-year stint at college teaching, McCourt returned to the high school classroom. His marriage was failing, and he struggled to connect to his students. On a particularly bad day, he took a magazine a student was illicitly reading in place of his textbook, and used it to slap the young man across the face. As soon as he had done it, he knew he had lost his class for the year, that his students would never view him the same, and that he would wrestle with guilt for years. He describes the way that, on many days, students managed to get him off-track by provoking him to tell stories of his childhood in Ireland. While he immensely enjoyed telling them, and his students enjoyed hearing them (especially in place of other work), at nights, he would drink himself into self-doubt about his worthiness as a teacher and resolve to be more-disciplined in the classroom. Of course, the next day would bring more stories. McCourt conveys a sense of unease, of discomfort, in his own skin as a teacher throughout his whole career that is not often found in stories about teachers. Learning to teach, as portrayed here by McCourt, is not clean, or neat, or even necessarily successful in the end.

McCourt’s portrayal of the education of teachers provides another interesting contrast to conventional ways of viewing teachers. He marveled at the confident way his professors of education proclaimed the ways that people should teach. They seemed to know so much and doubt so little. These recollections are interspersed throughout McCourt’s stories of his teaching that convey just the opposite; he knew so little and everything was uncertain. There were lessons to be learned in the teachers’ lounge though. Don’t let kids get to you. Don’t apologize. Don’t rock the boat. And McCourt clearly wrestles with these ideas. Sometimes he ventures beyond these limiting ideas, and often he does not. Either way, he doubts the appropriate course of action. But the most influential learning that McCourt portrays is the ways that he learns from his thirty years in the classroom. Each story he tells is an example of a lesson that he learned. These are not moral tales, with neat conclusions, but instead portray what teachers often take from their gravest errors or most accidental good fortune.

The challenge of writing an academic book review for Teacher Man is that this is not an academic book. McCourt is a master storyteller, honed by his years of practice in the classroom, and his book is a collection of these stories. But he does not have an argument to make or a thesis to defend. These stories are his life, and the limitations of the book are the limitations of his life. For example, one might wish this to read as a tale of an urban teacher who succeeds with students where others have failed. But McCourt’s tenure in the more challenging schools of New York City was marked by difficulty; he even left teaching for a time because he was unhappy in schools like these. Only when he began his career at a magnet school with more motivated students did McCourt begin to have much success at winning over his students and begin to find some personal fulfillment. One might wish this to read as a tale to inspire new teachers to reach for more ambitious teaching. But for every inspiring story, there is one that conveys the darker sides of teaching and the difficulty of doing it well. One might wish this to read as a source of data; this might be a story about one teacher’s journey from novice to expert. But one gets the sense that McCourt’s highest calling is to a good yarn, to his audience as readers, not as fact-checkers. The truth here is in the way that the stories touch the reader not necessarily in their correspondence with actual events. In fact, it is difficult to read this book as anything. The result is that this book does indeed have a place in the academy, not just in the bookstores, but only if the book is allowed to be what it intends to be – a collection of very human stories that will provoke laughter, heartbreak, and reflection on the lives of teachers.

References

Braithwaite, E. (1959). To Sir, With Love: New English Library.

Codell, E. R. (2001). Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.

Mandel, R. (Director). (1996). TheSubstitute [Motion Picture]. United States: Orion Pictures Corporation.

McCourt, F. (1996). Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. New York: Scribner.

Menendez, R. (Director). (1988). Stand and Deliver [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brother Pictures.

Smith, J. N. (Director). (1995). Dangerous Minds [Motion Picture]. United States: Buena Vista Pictures.

About the Reviewer

Jeffrey J. Rozelle is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy program at Michigan State University. His research interests include science teacher learning especially in and for urban schools. He is a former high school science teacher in Cincinnati Public Schools.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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