Half Sigma

Angela and the Baby Jesus?

A new Frank McCourt book is coming out this November. It's a children's book entitled Angela and the Baby Jesus.

I find this rather ironic. Frank McCourt mocked the Bible in his creative writing class at Stuyvesant High School, but now he's writing a book apparently designed to indoctrinate children into Christianity?

Class

Some people asked what the classes are in America.

The bible of class is the book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell. If there is one non-fiction book that you must read, this is it. Not only is it eye opening, it’s also hilarious. Especially the drawings.

However, the classes as Fussell describes them are slightly different from what people normally think of, so below is my attempt to synthesize this information:

Paul Fussell name	Normal name	Percent of pop.	Typical job
Top out-of-sight	Upper	0.5%	Philanthropist
Upper
Upper middle	Upper middle	7.5%	BIGLAW
Middle
	Middle	33%	School teacher
High prole
	Working class	50%	Aviation mechanic
Mid-prole			Truck driver
Low prole			Walmart
Destitute	Underclass	8%	Welfare mom
Bottom out-of-sight	Incarcerated	1%	Convict

The school teacher probably makes less money than the aviation mechanic, but class is more than just about money. The teacher has a college degree.

The bottom half of the class structure is pretty meritocratic. If you live by the rules and do everything you’re supposed to, you too can earn a college degree and become a school teacher.

On the other hand there’s no easy way to join the upper middle class. A few gifted middle class students do so well academically that they can graduate from the elite undergraduate and graduate schools and get a job at BIGLAW or in investment banking, but that’s not how most of the upper middle class get there.

Upper class status is a complete crapshoot. You are either born to it, or rise to it by being the lucky and undeserving victor in a winner-takes-all contest—even then you probably won’t be accepted by those born to it, but at least your children will be upper class.

Here is a very brief synopsis of Paul Fussell’s book:

• Middle class people have books in their home and proles don’t.
• Legible clothing is low class. As clothing increases in class, the words become smaller, then are replaced by symbols (like the polo pony), and finally at the top end there are no symbols at all, as with J. McLaughlin. You mean you never heard of J. McLaughlin? This demonstrates how there’s a whole level of clothing above Polo by Ralph Lauren that middle class with pretensions of being upper middle class have never even heard of.
• Upper classes like old stuff.
• Anything that’s British has higher class than something that’s not. That’s why the streets in pretentious housing developments have British-sounding names.
• Proles like to collect stuff stupid stuff, such as limited edition plates.
• The middle class think they’ve accomplished something by just going to college, the upper middle class know that if it’s not Ivy it’s not good. (And if you’re upper class, it’s also important to “prep” at the right place.)
• The upper class “summer” in place like Nantuckett and the Hamptons. The upper middle class are too busy working to do that. The real top upper class summer in places like Dark Harbor. You mean you never heard of Dark Harbor? There’s a whole level of summering spots that the upper middle class with pretensions of being upper class never even heard of. And that’s what Fussell means by “out-of-sight.” Regular people might stumble upon the upper class in the Hamptons, but you won’t see the top out-of-sight summering.
• Bowling is very low class. “If the upper class have yachts, what do proles have? Bowling. If you want to maintain upper status, it’s important that you never, never go bowling.”

The Human Beast

I highly recommend this lecture by Tom Wolfe, The Human Beast. Wolfe explains that status is the most important thing that the humans desire.

The Da Vinci Code, the book

With the movie coming out in just eight days, this is a good time to write my review of the book, which I finished reading last weekend.

The Da Vinci Code is a mediocre thriller/murder mystery about the murder of the curator of the Louvre, a college professor from Harvard named Robert Langdon, and a police cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, who is also the granddaughter of the murder victim.

I say it’s mediocre because the actions of the characters seem very unrealistic and the characters are also poorly developed, especially Robert Langdon who we learn absolutely nothing about despite the fact that he’s the main character. And regarding the mystery aspect of the book, the author Dan Brown purposely deceives you so that you have no hope of figuring things out for yourself.

I have to admit that I haven’t really read many thriller/murder mysteries. In fact, this might be my first. So maybe my above objections are par for the course and this book is actually a well written example of the genre. In any event, it sure isn’t literature.

The reason for the book’s popularity has nothing to do with the plot, but rather it has everything to do with what the characters have to say about Christianity and the Catholic Church. What we learn is that there exists historical evidence that Jesus wasn’t really the Son of God born from a virgin, but rather a regular person who was married to Mary Magdalene who bore Jesus a child. The New Testament wasn’t created until several hundred years after Jesus’ death. The Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, sponsored and strongly influenced by Roman emperor Constantine, is when the religion of Christianity as we know it today (in its Catholic incarnation) was actually created. At that time, the four Gospels included in the New Testament were edited to ensure that they agree with the story of Jesus’ divinity.

That Jesus wasn’t really God should come as no shock to the majority of the world’s inhabitants who already don’t believe in the religion, but it’s shocking indeed to people who believe. This is why Christian groups are trying to boycott the movie. It’s really too bad that the West had to cave into Muslims on the Danish cartoon controversy, because now Christians think that they too should have free speech antithetical to their religion banned.

There is nothing new in The Da Vinci Code, it’s a rehash of the nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which I haven’t read). However, The Da Vinci Code has sold a lot more copies, which is evidence that people would rather have their history served to them in the form of an easy to read novel rather than a long-winded tome.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the existence of a centuries old secret society known as the Priory of Sion, which was supposedly documented in detail in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is believed by many to be a hoax. A secret society makes for a good addition to a thriller/murder mystery, which probably explains why Dan Brown made it an important element of The Da Vinci Code storyline. Nevertheless, if Dan Brown got his facts wrong about the Priory of Sion, this in no way invalidates that idea that Jesus was just a regular person and not a miracle performing Son of God, but some Christians don’t seem to understand that.

The idea of teaching through a novel is not new. The best example is the novel The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, in which the manager of a factory saves both his factory and his marriage with the knowledge of just-in-time supply chain management he learns from a mysterious Israeli college professor. The Da Vinci Code has both a more interesting story and a more interesting (to Christians) set of facts to teach, which explains why it’s a huge bestseller while The Goal is only popular at business schools.

I predict that the movie, to be released May 19th, will be a huge box office success.

FOLLOWUP POSTS

The Da Vinci Code, the movie: watered down paganism

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

Check out my review of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits in my Contarian Investing Blog.

A semi-famous person leaves a comment on my blog

Johnny "the cop who wouldn't quit" Bonds (so named by author Rick Nelson in the book The Cop Who Wouldn't Quit) has left a comment on my old post about Mike Davis aka Walter Waldhauser, the nefarious Texas murderer and one of the nicest guys I attended law school with. Scroll down below his comment and read my reply.

An interesting review of Teacher Man

Ron Charles' review of Teacher Man by Frank McCourt is notable for (1) it's negativity; and (2) the fact the Charles was once an English teacher himself. He writes:

As deeply as I abhor the test-driven atmosphere that’s turning schools into re-enactments of Hard Times, I couldn’t shake my skepticism of the antics McCourt celebrates. Charming students with your personal life is one way to lead them into the wisdom, beauty and inspiration of literature, but for the teacher this is such an intoxicating, addictive method that it’s hard to keep the real destination clearly in mind.

He ends the review with the following observation:

And at most, he’s described the teacher we all wish we’d had.

If I ever gave the impression that I regretted having Mr. McCourt as a teacher, that would be a completely false impression. He was the most entertaining and enlightening teacher ever, even though he didn't teach us any English.

But Charles' point, which I think I agree with, is that the English teacher's job is to teach English, it's not to entertain and enlighten.

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.

Teacher Man blogging, chapters 6-7

Continuing to blog about Frank McCourt's recently released book Teacher Man.

Chapter Six is devoted to the story of how he assigned his students to write excuse notes. But then he was called to the principal's office on account of this creative assignment. I won't give away what happened to him. Read the book to find out.

Chapter Seven is a mish-mosh of stories about teaching. I wonder if they really happened the way he writes about them or if Mr. McCourt is hugely embellishing them. This is pretty much what I remember about his stories when I was in his class. I didn't really believe them. Although as I said before, the memories are hazy.

Teacher Man blogging, chapters 4-5

Continuing to blog about Frank McCourt's recently released book Teacher Man.

Chapter Four is nearly entirely devoted to a story about working at the docks. It has nothing to do with teaching. I thought this was a book about teaching. Maybe McCourt doesn't have that much to say about teaching, so instead he has to repackage stories from his previous memoirs?

Chapter Five is about teaching at McKee Vocational School in Staten Island. This book won't do much for Staten Island's reputation. Having grown up in Staten Island, I can attest that the borough sucks.

McCourt makes some more politically incorrect mentions of his students' breasts. I always suspected that the male teachers where hot for their underraged pupils, here is some more confirmation.

One of McCourt's students' parents complains that he doesn't teach anything, he just tells stories. That was the McCourt I remember, the guy was really fun to listen to and never made us do any real work.

Teacher Man in the New York Times

The two topics I've been blogging about the last few days are the outing and disappearance of the creator of the blog Underneath Their Robes, and the book Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. They both got mentioned in the New York Times today. So if you read my blog, you get to read about stuff before it appears in the New York Times. (Here's the link to the article.)

Monday evening, some of Mr. McCourt's students - among them professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and quite a few writers - gathered at Stuyvesant, in Lower Manhattan, for a reading by Mr. McCourt at a school fund-raiser ($60 a person for admission, hors d'oeuvres and a signed book).

Hey! No one invited me. But then, maybe I should have read the last Stuyvesant High School alumni newsletter.

Stuyvesant, a cherished jewel of the school system, has always had its fair share of exceptional, even beloved, teachers. Usually, those teachers savor fame only vicariously, when their students, say, win the Nobel Prize (Dr. Richard Axel, class of 1963) or appear in "Charlie's Angels" (Lucy Liu, class of 1986).

Lucy was in the class after me and I don't remember her at all. I suspect she looked quite ordinary at the time and didn't stand out in any way.

Of course, not all of Mr. McCourt's students idolized him. Some acknowledged that their memories of his class were hazy and that they fully appreciated his talents only in retrospect, after his publishing successes. His acerbic manner was not always welcome, and one former student described his class as "easy."

Yes, that's one view of his class that has quite a bit of truth to it. I can't remember any of his stories. Did he actually tell my class any, or was that just for the other classes? Yes, his Creative Writing class was most certainly easy, hardly any work required. Unfortunately, he actually made us do work for senior English, which is why I only got an 85.

I do remember his class being extremely fun and loved his sense of humor, but yes it did to go over the heads of many (most?) students. I've heard people say that they didn't like him, as hard as that is to believe.

But not Sam Marchiano, 38, who remembers the way Mr. McCourt would start class by asking students what they had for dinner the night before.

It was a lesson on the importance of detail that Ms. Marchiano, now a sportscaster, took to heart while describing her former teacher, down to the emerald green Shetland sweater he wore as he paced the room reciting Hemingway.

"I was a bit obsessed with him," she offered, "but in a good way."

Did Mr. McCourt ask me what I had for dinner? I don't remember.

But I do remember Sam, she was in the same homeroom as me for four years.

I don't remember McCourt wearing any sweaters, but I do recall that he was fond of wearing a sportscoat or blazer over a polo shirt, which was a popular look among Stuyvesant teachers in the eighties.

There was one chemistry teacher who wore his polo shirt in a manner that screamed gay, but I was too dumb to pick up on it at the time. However I was reminiscing with a friend from Stuyvesant a few weeks ago and we had a good laugh about it.

Teacher Man blogging, chapters 1-3

Frank McCourt’s book Teacher Man was released today, and I picked up my copy. Forty percent off at the Walden Books in the basement of the GE building at Rockefeller Center. What a bargain!

So far he hasn’t said that much about teaching. There was more about his miserable Irish childhood and going to school in Ireland, having sex with a girl named June who was in the teaching program at NYU, and funny stories about his teacher licensing exam.

I guess he's trying to make the point that nothing in a teacher's education really prepares him for the actual job. "Mr. McCourt" was the funnest and most enjoyable teacher I ever had, but did I actually learn anything in his class? He didn't think so, he gave me an 85, which was a pretty lousy grade.

After three chapters, it seems like a better book that ‘Tis; his sense of humor shines through the pages. But then it took McCourt six years to write Teacher Man, and it’s a pretty short book, so it had better be good.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, review coming soon

As those who follow this blog closely know, Frank McCourt was my Creative Writing and Senior English teacher when I was a student at Stuyvesant High School. (Yes, I was one of the lucky few to actually have him for two semesters.)

Frank McCourt’s book “Teacher Man” will be released this Tuesday, and I hope to be the first blogger to buy a copy and have a review online. So stay tuned.

Freakonomics: Cheating

This is the second of a series of blog posts reviewing Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Today we look at Chapter 1, “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?”

What they have in common is that they both cheat.

Freakonomics: Introduction

Unfortunately I’m late to the game of reviewing Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt’s new book. Other bloggers received free advance copies, while I had to buy mine from Amazon.com. Not fair.

But I am going to outdo the other reviews by reviewing the book one chapter at a time, which is pretty easy because there are only six chapters plus the introduction.