Teacher Man, chapters 8-18 and conclusion

Yes, I finished the book Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. I finished it yesterday actually. It’s a pretty short book. Once I had the chance to just sit down on my couch with time to read, before I knew it the book was finished.

I previously wrote briefly about chapters 1-3, chapters 4-5, chapters 6-7, and the NY Times article about Teacher Man. But this final wrap up goes into a lot more detail.

The blurb on the back of the book reads, “... it should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn’t hurt some politicians to read it too.” The blurb is vastly overhyping the book. It’s just one man’s memoir and there isn’t much in it that really tells you much about American high schools that you don’t already know. After all, if you are over the age of 36, then you attended high school at the time when Frank McCourt was teaching it. Furthermore, at least one third of the book is about McCourt’s life outside of the classroom.

Now for the parts of the book that I found especially interesting.

From chapter eight:

Every June during my eight years at McKee, the English department met in a classroom to read, evaluate, grade the New York State English Regents examination. Barely half the students passed the examination. The other half had to be helped. We tired to inflate the grades from high fifties to passing, the mandated sixty-five.

Today we think that the problems of standardized tests and the efforts of schools to boost their own kids’ scores on those tests are somehow unique to the current decade. But we see that schools in the sixties faced the same issues, and there was the same dishonesty in grading.

In case you are wondering if McCourt is really that smart, from chapter eleven:

... I sat for the American Graduate Record Examination ... and astonished myself and those around me with a score in the ninety-ninth percentile in English.

As I suspected, McCourt was far too bright to be a high school teacher. He was bright but lazy. He went to Trinity College in Dublin to get a PhD, but didn’t have the discipline required to complete the program.

McCourt is self deprecating about his intelligence. About Stuyvesant, which is New York City’s best public high school and only selects the best students via a competitive admissions test, McCourt writes, “Now I taught where I could never have been one of the [students].” Not true. McCourt was definitely Stuyvesant material.

In a previous essay about Frank McCourt, I wrote:

his book ‘Tis does leave you with the impression that he was tremendously let down by the lack of intellectual leanings on the part of his students, and I know that’s how he felt about me. That was a phase of my life when I thought The Lord of the Rings was the greatest thing ever written, and McCourt certainly didn’t think so.

McCourt apparently responds in chapter twelve:

They moaned when I announced we were going to read A Tale of Two Cities. Why couldn’t they read The Lord of the Rings, Dune, science fiction in general? Why couldn’t they . . . ?

Also from chapter twelve:

When I discussed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with my classes, I discovered they were ignorant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Blank looks around the room.

I wrote about Stuyvesant students’ lack of religiosity and McCourt’s Bible lesson in my previous essay. Many years later I finally bought a copy of the Bible because I remembered Mr. McCourt telling us that it was important to have a copy because so much of Western literature was influenced by it.

In chapter 13 he writes:

English was a required subject, but Creative Writing was an elective. You could take it or leave it. They took it. They flocked to my classes. The room was packed. They sat on windowsills. One teacher, Pam Sheldon, said, Why don’t they just let him teach in Yankee Stadium? That’s how popular I was.

What was this enthusiasm for “creative writing”? Did the boys and girls suddenly want to express themselves? Was it my masterly teaching, my charisma, my Irish Charm? The old faith and begorrah factor?

Or had the word spread that this McCourt just rambled on and then disbursed high marks as easily as peanuts?

I answered McCourt’s question in my previous essay:

I didn’t take Creative Writing because it’s what I was interested in—not that I actually knew what I was interested in back when I was in high school—I took the class because Frank McCourt was so highly recommended by other students.

It should be noted here that one of the reasons he was so recommended was because he would allegedly let kids cut his class whenever they wanted to. The “cool kids” (the ones who lived on the Upper East Side) could often be seen hanging out in Stuyvesant Square Park smoking pot when they should have been in McCourt’s class.

McCourt wrote:

I didn’t want to be known as an easy marker. I would have to toughen my image. Tighten up. Organize. Focus.

I wrote:

Were you really allowed to cut his class at will? I’m not sure; I think he started cracking down on that the semester I had him.

I guess, unfortunately, I had him when he was going through one of those phases where he was trying to toughen his image.

In chapter fourteen McCourt writes:

I tell my classes that on Mondays they should bring in The New York Times so we can read Mimi Sheraton’s restaurant reviews.

Now this is the kind of stuff McCourt did that gets me mad. His class was filled with kids from the Upper East Side and other expensive areas of New York City whose parents routinely took them to restaurants of the kind that Mimi Sheraton would review.

But my parents were poor, and the only restaurants I ever ate at were cheap diners in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Mimi Sheraton wouldn’t be caught dead in any of those places. So the rich kids understood exactly what the restaurant reviews were about, while the topic was completely alien to me.

I began life not realizing that I was from the lower social classes. I grew up in the working class borough of Staten Island (which McCourt does a good job of mocking in Teacher Man, and deservedly so because Staten Island is a horrid place), and all of my friends and acquaintances were obviously from the same place, so I didn’t realize that there was a whole high class world out there which I wasn’t a part of.

When I went off to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, it was the first time in my life that I had contact with New York City’s upper classes. I didn’t immediately absorb the difference between the classes. I didn’t have McCourt’s Creative Writing class until my senior year, yet his class was full of epiphanies in which I realized how inadequate my background was.

In one class, he asked kids in the class what plays they had seen. The kids with affluent and sophisticated parents had been to real plays. But I had to embarrassingly tell Mr. McCourt that the “play” I saw was a musical about Noah’s Ark. He mocked the concept in front of the class, and asked me if I had been to any real plays, not musicals. I shamefully said that I hadn’t. And I knew that I wasn’t going to see one anytime soon because my parents were way too cheap to ever take me to see a play that wasn’t a musical about Noah’s Ark held in the basement of a synagogue in Brooklyn.

I spent many years feeling inadequate about never having seen a real play until I finally saw some plays at the Actors Theatre of Phoenix (which put on some surprisingly edgy productions for a city so far off the beaten path of culture).

Those who follow this blog closely (there are one or two who do, believe it or not) know that I blog a lot about topics of social class, and someone once commented that I was obsessed with the topic. If that’s the case, then the roots of the obsession go back to Frank McCourt’s Creative Writing class.

Returning to the book Teacher Man, my conclusion is that Frank McCourt, although brilliant, witty, and a great story teller, was also full of character flaws, both as a teacher and a man. In his book ‘Tis he wrote about his problems with drinking. In Teacher Man, we see that he was unable to finish a PhD, and until he got his job at Stuyvesant he was pretty much a failure as a teacher. He knew that teaching high school was beneath him, but he lacked the ambition and drive to rise above that into a more prestigious profession.

The average high school doesn’t need a teacher with the brilliance required to write a book like Angela’s Ashes, the average high school just needs teachers who are good disciplinarians, who can force just a little bit of knowledge into the students’ brains so they can pass their standardized tests. Only at a high school like Stuyvesant could a teacher like McCourt find a home, and even at Stuyvesant McCourt went over the heads of the less intelligent and the less sophisticated. Even though many students loved him, and he certainly made an indelible impression on me, there were other students who didn’t like him because they found him intellectually intimidating and they probably got the impression that he looked down on them.

In the end, Frank McCourt is one of his generation’s most brilliant memoirists, and he was perhaps the most witty and entertaining man ever to stand in front of a high school classroom, but he was not especially good at actually teaching high school English.

Comments

[Samuel Alito]

Phoenix? Good lord.

As I was reading your post, I was thinking about religion in the classroom. I found that I had a tremendous advantage in my literature classes in college because of the fact that I had in fact studied the bible in high school.

In Phoenix.

At Brophy, actually.

I found that being in a liberal-arts environment, it was startling how few of the students had even heard fundamental bible stories (say, the prodigal son or Jacob wreslting with the angel), let alone the stylistic differences between John and Mark.

Phoenix. Sheesh. That brings me back.

Sam

[Samuel Alito]

wait a second.

if you're in hell's kitchen.

when were you in phoenix?

[Half Sigma]

I get around a lot. Lived in Phoenix, then Northern Virginia near Washigton DC, and now in Hell's Kitchen in New York City.

[A high school English teacher]

"As I suspected, McCourt was far too bright to be a high school teacher."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this comment coming from a Stuyvesant graduate.

[Woodstock Moonwalker]

"Teacher Man" revisited: I don't think you fully appreciate Frank McCourt. I just finished reading "Teacher Man" and read his two previous books. I enjoy watching him interviewed on TV and would go to a place where he lectured. I even went to Limerick to see the places he wrote about in Angela's Ashes. I have my gripes with him, too, but I feel that he is a real success story and not the kind of "loser" you paint in your descripions. My biggest gripe is that he blasts his childhood, his church and his nationality, yet he is what he is today because of those negative experiences. He is living proof of the what Hegel wrote: "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -- his "doggedness", which he writes about, is the result of his youthful struggles, as I see it. When we look at a man's life, we should look at the whole thing -- and where he is now, in his mid 70's -- even though it took him a long time to get there -- is at the top of his game. And contrary to what you said in your blog, guys like this make great high school teachers. You demean the teaching profession when you say he was too smart to teach High School. By the way, I found your blog because after reading his three books, I was hoping I'd find something written about him by a former student, and also, knowing where Stuyvesant is located, I was hoping to find someone talk about the experience there on 9/11 -- and I found such a thing by going to Google to find an essay about 9-11 at Stuyvesant on the day of the terrorist attack by a Stuyvesant journalism student. I hope Frank McCourt has another book in him! Thanks for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts. I'm a former High School teacher. I only taught high school for 7 years (the same time McCourt was teaching on Staten Island). However, I moved on to become a college professor, albeit at a Community College in New Jersey. However, my happiest memories are my days of teaching High School in Pittsburgh.

[Half Sigma]

"I don't think you fully appreciate Frank McCourt."

I do appreciate him. I was a fan before he was even famous.

But just because he is a talented entertainer who writes a good memoir doesn't mean he is without the negative attributes I mentioned above.

[Russ Kovach]

I think it would be wise to NOT suggest that high school teachers need not be 'intelligent'; or that certain people are 'too intelligent' to be high school teachers. Perhaps one of the biggest failings in public education is that the teachers are not experts in their fields. People that are 'intelligent' in their fields are specifically the ones that SHOULD be teaching in high schools! Frank McCourt obviously had intelligence, initiative, and most of all creativity. It is, I belive, more appropriate to say that the PhD professors at universities across the land may very well be intelligent enough to teach high school, but one wonders if they are creative enough to do an effective job. Fortunately for all of us there are many Frank McCourts out there... may we all be lucky enough to have one like him as a teacher!

[Half Sigma]

Russ, this would be a huge waste of society's resources to have very intelligent people teaching average high school students.

The only exception might be mating the most intelligent teachers with the most intelligent students, but providing better teaching for gifted students is not something the educational system is currently concerned with, unfortunately.

[R. Flaherty]

I am truly puzzled by your statement that brilliant people are wasting their time educating average students. It is clear from your previous comments that elitism was the primary lesson taught at Stuyvesant and you leaned those lessons well despite your humble past.

Did you miss McCourt’s examples use of creativity and intelligence to reach “average” children? I don’t think McCourt wasted a minute of his time in public schools. In fact, it seems to me he was at his best…he just spent too much time listing to the voices in society that denigrate teaching as a profession and started to believe those comments himself.

[rose]

Regarding Mimi Sheraton's restaurant reviews, it might have escaped you that he picked her because she was a good creative writer, not because she reviewed exclusive restaurants. Besides, I think it's a teacher's job to expose students to a wider world than they are used to, including the fact that there is bad food, average food, good food, excellent food, and superb food.

As for McCourt making fun of the Bible, I think that is too bad, especially for those who believed and were enbarrassed to contradict him or stop him. But the fact that anything at all was taught about the Bible is a minor miracle. To understand the western world and culture one needs to have at least literary knowledge of the Bible, as well as of Greek mythology and Roman society. When someone refers to our planet Earth as an ark, I would think it would be important to know what is meant by an "ark". When someone talks about "the life of Job" it would be awfully convenient to know who Job was. When someone uses the word "narcissistic" I would think it would be equally important to know about Narcissus, the youth who fell in love with his own beauty in Greek mythology; and when someone refers to the "senate" I would think it would be helpful to know how the original Roman senate worked. All that can be taught with respect, without making fun of it, and without teaching dogma. I don't think it was particularly fair of McCourt to use his own religious resentments and his own "odd" religious upbringing on his students by making fun of the Bible.

[A. Marie]

I am presently reading Teacher Man with a group of people at Senior Net.com We have had some lively discussions on our feelings about Frank McCourt as a teacher. I am excited with reading your personal experiences as a student under him. I must say, you have affirmed every belief and thought I have gotten of him since reading his book. The one thing that bothered me the most in Teacher Man, was how he dealt with Hector, Boom Boom Brandt, Andrew and his thoughts of how he wanted to deal with other students. I struggle with seeing him laying his hands on a student only because he did not open his magazine, or for tilting a chair or for not having a written absence excuse. I agree with what he said, I feel he used the storytelling to avoid teaching the material all those years. As a teacher myself for fifteen years, I see him as a failure in teaching English. Thank you for your personal blogs, they gave me much insight into the man from someone who knew him. I like to see him as he quoted Ben Johnson, "Language reveals the man. Speak that I may see." I see him clearly through his book Teacher Man, and can say I am not sure I like the man I see. As a writer I agree he is entertanining and I am sure much of this is embellished.

[spungen]

You're far kinder than I would be with those memories. He sounds like a pretentious lech -- typical of the breed, except for his later publishing luck. I think pop culture needs to cut way back on the lionization of hip male English teachers. Did "Dead Poet's Society" start it? It sets up guys who are often unsuccessful, unattractive, dysfunctional, and insecure as undeserving demigods to underaged girls and boys.

How come you never hear about a hip *math* teacher? The "Stand and Deliver" guy doesn't really count. No wonder there's such a liberal arts imbalance in colleges.

[Half Sigma]

"He sounds like a pretentious lech"

No, he was really cool. Most enjoyable teacher I ever had at any level of education.

[spungen]

But that was so sad, his ridicule of your little Noah's Ark musical. I was vicariously insulted. Not to mention the breast remarks.

I had a hip male English teacher too, who got fired after hitting on a number of female students (guess how I know), then moving in with one (not me). Took me many years afterward to realize he was a manipulative creep, despite his hipsterness and (to us) sophistication. At the time he was pretty entertaining, despite occasional abusiveness.

I'm truly disappointed with your observation that McCourt was too intelligent to be a high school teacher, and with your later comment that intelligent teachers in high schools are wasted unless they're with highly intelligent students. Of course bright kids need bright - and educated - teachers; so do average and low-ability students. When you're a teacher in an AP English class and your kids do well, they should: you are, after all, making silk purses out of silk. But when you light an intellectual fire in a student who doesn't give a damn about school, or about books, or about his own life, you make a real change in the world. And the making of just that sort of change is what American public schools are supposed to be about.

You can never be 'too intelligent' to be a teacher. The teaching profession needs to attract inspired, creative, intelligent individuals. However, attitudes such as yours help to reinforce the idea that teaching is`a second class profession- one to be treated with contempt rather than respect. Frank Mccourt was only too aware of this common perception of teaching which is why he attempted to find a way out of the High School System. You are extremely lucky to have been taught by Mr Mccourt. P.S. I find it hard to believe that you were unaware of social divisions and inequalities until you took Mccourts creative writing class in senior year.

[spark]

The most important job in the world is to facilitate children's learning, from in-utero to adulthood. Teachers are especially important in this role. Frank McCourt tapped into his students' strengths and interests (like the Reggio Emilia approach in Italy, which has been proven to be successful). As an early childhood educator, I feel warmly encouraged by Frank McCourt. I believe he is a great role model for teachers. You cannot be too intelligent to inspire young people.

[mel]

You, Mr. Half Sigma blogger, are the luckiest duck to have sat in Frank McCourt's class, so stop with the "oh poor me!"
I've been a failure of a teacher for 14 years, Frank McCourt's Teacher Man is the closest book you'll find on the subject of what teachers endure. As for McCourt not being any good at actually teaching English - you do it. I've taught English from 8th graders to 60 year olds - any time there's any learning in my classroom was when we strayed from the curriculum and made real life connections. Hooray for Frank McCourt!

[joe nevin]

I enjoyed reading your comments. Thanks. I was especially interested in the comment about class or background. I went to a pretty mixed school in Glasgow, Scotland, where this was a very big issue and teachers would have been in no doubt that their reference material was designed to hit one audience or another.

Unfortunately for me, I was usually part of the other.

So I really hear what you are saying.

I eventually went to Art School and was surrounded by rich kids who were slumming it for a while and most of the working class guys who could paint realised that they were painting for a middle class audience, even though they started out as being pretty gutsy and wanting to change the whole rotten system.

Frank seems like a really nice guy. He's only human and he knows it, which is a real salvation. He's also very talented and was probably punching way below his weight for years and could maybe allow his rapier wit to savage the unsuspecting on a Monday morning.

But what you say is very relevant: You must never forget your roots and you must remember what team you are playing for, otherwise it is easy to become a court jester...something that John Lennon felt he had become for the upper class in England.

Finally, great writers don't always make great teachers. You were just lucky to see one face to face, like a commet that comes along once in a lifetime. It's a good thing.

All the best

Joe :-)

P.S. keep the faith

[joe nevin]

Oh no! I've just typed comet with two 'm's and Frank's going to get me and tell me that I couldn't even write a menu for some greasy spoon where they serve fried bread!

[Jalil Buechel]

Thank you for your comments on Frank McCourt. This is my 33rd year of teaching as a Special Educator. One thing McCourt captures well is the sense of how little we know as teachers. However Mr McCourt appears to be a pretty good observer - and that is a key ingredient in making teaching real for the learner. That he had flaws was pretty clear in your comments and from reading the book - which I just finished. For my two cents, I would say that the hardest thing about teaching is always keeping the perspective that all teaching happens from heart to heart. The mind can help you appear clever and can even be the star attraction but when you teach from the heart you allow the student to shine. Then students say "Look what we learned ourselves!" - Jalil Buechel, Estacada Oregon