Teacher Man (McCourt)

Teacher Man 
Frank McCourt, 2005
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743243780


Summary 
Since the publication of Angela's Ashes nearly a decade ago, Frank McCourt has become one of literature's superstars. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Booksellers Association ABBY Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. More than four million copies of Angela's Ashes are now in print; its sequel, 'Tis, has sold more than two million in America; and the books have been published in more than twenty countries and languages.

In Teacher Man Frank turns his attention to the subject that he most often talks about in his lectures—teaching: why it's so important, why it's so undervalued. He describes his own coming of age—as a teacher, a storyteller, and, ultimately, a writer. He is alternately humble and mischievous, downtrodden and rebellious. He instinctively identifies with the underdog; his sympathies lie more with students than administrators. It takes him almost fifteen years to find his voice in the classroom, but what's clear in the thrilling pages of Teacher Man is that from the beginning he seizes and holds his students' attention by telling them memorable stories. And then it takes him another fifteen years to find his voice on the page.

With all the wit, charm, irreverence, and poignancy that made Angela's Ashes and 'Tis so universally beloved, Frank McCourt tells his most exhilarating story yet-how he became a writer. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—August 19, 1930
• Death—July 19, 2009
• Where—Brooklyn, NY, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University; M.A. Brooklyn College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1997; National Book Critics Circle
   Award, 1996
• Currently—New York, NY


Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, best known as the author of Angela’s Ashes.

Frank McCourt was the eldest son of Malachy McCourt (1901-1986) and Angela Sheehan (1908-1981). Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just a few weeks after birth, in 1935. Following this first tragedy, his family moved back to Ireland, where the twin brothers died within a year of the family's arrival and where Frank's youngest brothers, Michael (b. 1936) and Alphie (b. 1940), were born.

Unable to find steady work, in the depths of the depression, McCourts returned to their mother's native Limerick, Ireland in 1934, where they sank deeper into poverty. McCourt's father, from Toome in County Antrim, was often without work, but drank with the little money he did earn. When McCourt was eleven, his father left with other Irishmen to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry in England. His brothers Malachy McCourt and Alphie McCourt are also autobiographical writers. In the mid-1980s Francis and Malachy created the stage play A Couple of Blaguards, a two-man show about their lives and experiences.

He sent little money to the family, leaving Frank's mother to raise four surviving children, often by begging. Frank's public education ended at age 13, when the Congregation of Christian Brothers rejected him, despite a recommendation from his teacher. Frank then held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers, Malachy, Michael (who now lives in San Francisco), and Alphonsus ("Alphie") (who lives in Manhattan); the other three siblings had died in infancy or early childhood in the squalor of the family circumstances. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. In Angela's Ashes, McCourt described an entire block of houses sharing a single outhouse, flooded by constant rain, and infested with rats and vermin.

At age nineteen he left Ireland, returning to the United States where, after a stint working in New York City's Biltmore Hotel, he was drafted during the Korean War and was sent to Germany. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs.

He graduated in 1956 from New York University with an MA degree in English. He taught English at McKee High School in Staten Island. Frank McCourt taught across a range of five New York schools, including McKee Technical and Vocational High School and Stuyvesant High School. He also taught in the English department of New York City Technical College of the City University of New York. In a 1997 New York Times Op-Ed essay, Mr. McCourt wrote about his experiences teaching immigrant mothers there.

He received the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir Angela's Ashes (1996), which details his impoverished childhood in Limerick. He also authored 'Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. Teacher Man (2005) detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher.

McCourt was a member of the National Arts Club and was a recipient of the Award of Excellence from The International Center in New York. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.

It was announced in May 2009 that he had been treated for melanoma and that he was in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy. On 19 July 2009, he died from the cancer, with meningeal complications, at a hospice in Manhattan.

Extras
• McCourt was first married in August 1961 (div. 1979), to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret. He married again, in August 1984 (div. 1985) to psychotherapist Cheryl Ford. He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, and they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut. He is survived by Ellen, his daughter Maggie, a granddaughter Chiara, grandsons Frank and Jack, and his three brothers and their families.

• In his free time, McCourt took up the casual sport of rowing. He once sank his Wintech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in New York, and had to be rescued by a local rowing team. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
McCourt has produced a collection of aphorisms that will grace classroom posters till the last red pen runs dry. ("You'd be better off as a cop. At least you'd have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth.") And at most, he's described the teacher we all wish we'd had.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela's Ashes and continued in 'Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt's 30-year teaching career in New York City's public high schools, which began at McKee Vocational and Technical in 1958. His first day in class, a fight broke out and a sandwich was hurled in anger. McCourt immediately picked it up and ate it. On the second day of class, McCourt's retort about the Irish and their sheep brought the wrath of the principal down on him. All McCourt wanted to do was teach, which wasn't easy in the jumbled bureaucracy of the New York City school system. Pretty soon he realized the system wasn't run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. "I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study." As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write "excuse notes" from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It's about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt's many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn't hurt some politicians to read it, too.
Publishers Weekly

Here is the long-anticipated final installment in the trilogy of memoirs by Pulitzer Prize winner McCourt (Angela's Ashes). His previous volumes told the tale of his life through many categories of struggle and triumph, from a poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick to a return to his birthplace, New York City, and his quest there for a better existence. In Teacher Man, however, McCourt focuses upon his particular journey as a teacher in New York City public school classrooms, from his first day in front of a class at a vocational high school in Staten Island-he had not graduated from high school himself but had talked his way into NYU for a college degree covered by the GI Bill—to his accomplishments as a veteran instructor, skilled in unorthodox methods of teaching English and creative writing to exceptional students. McCourt's characteristically vivid storytelling, with his rendering of the distinct and searing voices of particular students, enables his readers to see, hear, and feel this story, a voyage of discovery for students and teacher and, ultimately, all who read this marvelous book. A particular interest in the teaching profession is not required: Teacher Man relates to us all. Every bit as good as Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, this is highly recommended. —Mark Bay, Cumberland Coll. Lib., Williamsburg, KY
Library Journal

The pathos McCourt created in his first two memoirs just may be wearing thin. While some critics thought Teacher Man focused, fresh, and exciting, others saw a self-deprecating author at work, his prose littered with clichés.... Still, the memoir rings true for teachers in its depictions of daily classroom trials, and McCourt’s honesty and storytelling gifts remain unsurpassed.
Bookmarks Magazine

His new book is hardly a teaching manual; however, what it is on one level is a tough but poignant and certainly eloquent defense of the sacrifices and honorableness of those in the teaching profession ("Teaching is the downtown maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back") and a lesson itself in taking yourself seriously—but not too. —Brad Hooper
Booklist

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Teacher Man:

1. Talk about the tension, described by McCourt, between the teachers and school administrators. How do the bureaucrats interfere with, even hinder, McCourt's efforts in the classroom? Does this tension exist in today's classrooms? Are teachers always right, especially in using unorthodox teaching methods? Or should administrators have powers of oversight to ensure students recieve quality or standardized instruction? At what point does interference become inhibiting to classroom creativity?

2. Discuss some of the ways in which McCourt motivated his students? What goes into making an inspired teacher?

3. This book has been seen as a "coming-of-age" story—in that it traces McCourt's development from an inexperienced teacher to a fully competent and confident one, capable of dealing both with recalcitrant students and interfering administrators. Can you trace the stages of McCourt's professional growth? In other words—what does he learn, how and when does he learn it?

4. What lesson did McCourt learn from the incident with the African-American girls at Seward Park High School and the Hamlet theater production?

5. McCourt believes that teachers are not given their proper due in society—they're the "downtown maid of professions." Do you agree with his assessment? Should teachers be valued more and, if so, how do we go about doing so?

6. For McCourt teaching is about forming intellects, not simply "teaching to the test." But in reality, students need to score well on assessment/achievement tests in order to do well in life. Can this ongoing contradiction ever be resolved?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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