Teacher Man

Teaching high school is surely one of the most difficult professions. To hear Frank McCourt tell it--the challenges are devilishly amplified while our admiration for his candor and creativity is certain. McCourt recounts his experiences in New York's urban classrooms with perspective and the indomitable flair of a storyteller. Listeners will be amazed, inspired, and delighted. His thirty-year teaching career is punctuated with small triumphs, pitfalls, and difficult choices, but always candor and respect for his students. McCourt's rendition of the accents of his 1950s' Staten Island students, delivered in his Irish brogue, is a unique treat that a print reader would miss. This is a tidy abridgment, and listeners will enjoy what audio memoirs do best. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 12, 2005
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.

Frank McCourt specializes in writing about survival of childhood, of emigration, and now in his new memoir, of New York City's public schools. After hearing of his adventures teaching the future plumbers and beauticians of America-he kept a lid on utter chaos by telling stories from his own life--the listener will be as glad as the author was when he finally arrives at the prestigious Stuyvesant High, where he uses recipes to teach creative writing. The author's voice is characterized by his bemused brogue, but flashes of anger also abound, the vestiges of a deprived childhood. His impersonations of his students' constant interruptions are filled with affection and respect. McCourt's storytelling is, once again, mesmerizing. And if you're a teacher, so much the better. E.K.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine