This is my favourite of Frank McCourt's books. I found Angela's Ashes just too unremittingly bleak.

Teacher Man is not all about teaching as it tells of how he lives in New York before accidentally becoming a teacher. Anyone who's ever been in a classroom and especially teachers will 'enjoy' his descriptions of being in a room with a group of kids who would rather eat dirt than listen to him. But he succeeds through his having 'kissed the Blarney Stone' and tells tales (mostly true) of his life. McCourt writes with the honesty of someone who has actually done all he writes of.

His advice to a new teacher is great: 'You have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish.'

Fabulous book......And I just read it again for the third time. It restores my faith in the value of teaching and the idiocy of those who decide on education policy.

This memoir made me miss teaching, and writing, and being a student, and Stuyvesant High School, and all of my wonderful and weird and thoughtful and mysterious and empathetic English teachers throughout the years. And now I'll greatly miss listening to Frank McCourt on my daily walks around my newly strange neighborhood.

I enjoyed reading about Frank McCourt's time in the classrooms of New York. Of course I've read Angela's Ashes, and I read his brother Malachy's autobiography, I knew Mr. McCourt had become a teacher. I STILL found this painful reading; this is Frank McCourt and his past is present in his writing, in fact he spends quite a bit of classroom time talking about his miserable Irish childhood. He tells us he talks about it, he doesn't actually spend very much book time talking about it. But the subject tends to fascinate his students, and the kids enjoy storytelling more than they like school assignments. So even as Frank McCourt entertains us with his stories of teaching in New York high schools, he also tells of us his insecurities and self-criticism, his failures and his sins. All of that self-recrimination rang in me like a struck bell. Frank McCourt is funny, successful, he is a survivor. This book didn't hurt as bad as Angela's Ashes, I cried for about a month with that one, but still; I am feeling pain and I don't want to. I suppose there must be some pain in me that matches with the pain in Frank McCourt that is causing this resonating vibrato of pain.
The book is certainly not all sorrow; as I said, he is funny and really is a masterful teacher in a non-traditional manner. I think his students were fortunate to have him as a teacher and he was fortunate to have them as students.

I've always loved to read about teachers' experiences and methods, so Frank Court's Teacher Man perfectly matched my horizon of expectations, so to speak. It was emotional, entertaining, interesting and, of course, instructive. I especially liked the apparently random memories, and the fact that he insists upon personal events only when they have an impact on his teaching. I think it would have been a joy to see him in front of his students with his unorthodox but such efficient method of teaching that his students didn't even know they were taught.


P.S. I definitely have to read Angela's Ashes!

I really wanted to love this book. Having just qualified as a teacher, it very much appealed to read a novel about somebody from a deprived background falling almost accidentally into the teaching profession in New York without being remotely prepared for what he has let himself in for.

The first few chapters delivered exactly what I wanted - inspirational quotations about teaching, about how misunderstood the profession is and the common assumptions that get thrown around regarding the amount of time off teachers get. It was quite gratifying to know that even in 1950s New York, this was the same as it is today.

But as the novel went on, and McCourt documents his journey through the profession and the various schools which he finds himself working in, it started to get a little dull, and by the last 50 pages I was skim reading large chunks of it.

Enjoyable in parts, but a bit of a drag to get through. Not really got much else to say about it which I think shows that it did not have a great effect on me.

Тут должен быть какой-то осмысленный восхищенный текст с цитатами, но я закончила книжку и грандиозно реву, что автор умер и больше ничего никогда не напишет.

After reading Angela’s Ashes, I wanted to read the second volume of the McCourt series. I was interested to see what became of young Frank after he left his poor childhood years in Ireland and went to America. But it turns out that book is out of print and not available at my library. So I jumped to the third volume, which covers Frank’s years as a teacher in several NY highschools.

This is, of course, a very different book from Angela’s Ashes, but I still liked it a lot. This is not just a journal of a teacher struggling to get through to his students despite the limitations of the state's bureaucracy and the parent’s expectations for good grades, but also a portrait of the US, through the lives of hundreds of students.

A sad thing to realise is that although this book covers the 1950ies and 60ies, many of the problems it talks about are still present in today’s schools.

On a side note, having homeschooled my children during primary school, I felt a special connection with the writer whenever he wrote about his doubts and insecurities about his classes and teaching methods:

“(...) other English teachers were teaching solid stuff, analyzing poetry, assigning research papers and giving lessons on the correct use of footnotes and bibliography. Thinking of those other English teachers and the solid stuff makes me uneasy again. They’re following the curriculum, preparing the kids for higher education and the great world beyond. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves, teacher man.”

Now looking back, many years after, I am so glad about all we did and the fun we had.

I read this book years ago, at the start of my teaching career. I can't remember if I was student teaching or if it was my first year, but nevertheless, I was a newbie. I actually started reading it again forgetting this was the Frank McCourt book I had read years ago. It took me about two pages to realize my mistake, but I figured I might as well finish it since I hadn't even remembered I had read it in the first place.
McCourt no doubt has some questionable pedagogy. Some of his out-of-the-box lessons are clever while others are downright ridiculous. He wrote he felt guilty not sticking to the curriculum, but I suppose sometimes it takes risks to discover gold. I feel a little cheated because we never get to experience a typical day in his classroom...there's no way he had his students reciting recipes every day throughout his decades of teaching. What did a regular day look like? He had to have touched on some of the curriculum throughout the year, but I suppose those stories may not have been as engaging.
What I did not appreciate was his manner regarding his marriage. He nonchalantly writes about cheating on his wife, claiming that it was a marriage doomed from the start. Ummm, when did that make it okay to have affairs? And, what are these stories adding to this book?
The best part about the book is the stories about students and their lives. I tell my students "teachers are people, too!" but maybe we sometimes forget that the same applies to our students. We see them in a bubble and make judgments based on their attentiveness in our class and their homework completion and perceived effort, but they have home lives and struggles, just like us. Oh sure, with the "troubled" kids, you can clearly see that there are outside forces pulling them from being a motivated student, but what about the others?
I sometimes get jealous that other teachers get to know more about their students' outside worlds. English teachers have papers, art teachers see their pieces rife with emotion, religion teachers have journals...what about math teachers? We get to see word problems. It's hard to start deep, provocative discussions around the topic "how to solve for x"

There is something comforting in knowing that students were always apathetic and wanting distraction.

Well, I finally try something by Mr. McCourt, former New York City public high school teacher, now the celebrated and successful writer of best sellers like "Angela's Ashes" and this book here. One can see why this was a popular book. McCourt is an engaging raconteur, in the Irish tradition - witty, anecdotal, ironic - and his story is an interesting one. He never takes himself too seriously, altho some anger occasionally pokes thru.

In this book, McCourt tells a the tale of his college years, the time in his twenties he put in working as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks, and most importantly, his life as a teacher. There are tales of romance with a young lady who is also the lover of one of his professors. There are stories of his first couple of jobs, early years bouncing around from school to school, just getting by. He seems to have the knack of getting a little too witty with people from time to time. He teaches at a vocational school in Staten Island, and at a community college, but does not get off to a promising start. He touches a bit on marriage and fatherhood, but does not get too far into his relations with his family. Pubs and drinking seem to be a fairly consistent distraction, and one gets the sense that before he began telling his tales to a word processor, he told them in barrooms over pints of Guinness. At one point, he gets accepted to Trinity College in Dublin for a graduate program, but is unable to pull his dissertation on Irish-American literary relations into a manageable form. McCourt seems to always be the witty outsider, the smart kid from the rough side of the tracks in Limerick who can't quite find his place in the world. But redemption comes calling in the form of a substitute teaching gig at a top high school, where surprisingly enough, he is asked to stay on and ends up a popular and successful writing teacher.

There are numerous recollections of strange and funny encounters with students. There is the bizarre story of the girl whose sister's husband lost his arms in Korea, and wants sex all the time. There is Kevin, an imaginative (and probably schizophrenic) young man who takes a liking to the author. There is the gang of impossible to control Black girls that he takes to a movie in Times Square. There is the recitation of recipes with musical accompaniment. There are hilarious excuse notes which he saves and then turns into a lesson. And there is some good advice for teachers too.

This was a colorful, anecdotal read, but not lacking in some real substance and insight. Still, I am sure there have been more powerful books written about teaching and life in the schools. This is a likeable one however, and I think therein lies the core of McCourt's success as a writer.

I read Teacher Man on a whim. I read Angela's Ashes seemingly in a past life, and scarcely remember much of it. Did he throw up his communion wafers, & did the priest chastise him for rejecting the body of Christ? And do I remember him having to lick it up? Was there also some closing section that involved the long death of a sweetheart to tuberculosis, or am I confusing that with Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets"?

Teacher Man doesn't demand extensive knowledge of Frank McCourt's other two memoirs, and could easily stand as its own work. McCourt records his experiences in education - trying to get a job, trying to get certified, getting advanced degrees, realizing he's not good, realizing he might be good, and finally realizing that maybe the job he was half-heartedly doing was his calling.

McCourt is unusually honest, and unsentimental, about the experience of teaching. I'm pretty tired of the Dead Poets' Society version of teaching - where you tear the pages out of the book, where each kid is a romantic poet waiting to be born out of the welter of adolescence. McCourt describes the fears every classroom teacher has - can I keep control? What will they do next? What if I run out of things to do with them? How do I win over a kid that wants to fight me? How do I manage to discuss personal & intimate things with these confused people, and yet maintain the right boundaries?

He talks a lot about the anxieties of teaching, and the rewards, but he also spends a surprising amount of time talking about his personal relationships - his girlfriends, his wife, his mentors. It was refreshing to see a teacher that didn't retreat to a cat-laden apartment and tend the mould growing on his personality. Years and years of treating children as a fragile endangered species have restricted who you're allowed to be as a teacher. According to this idea, you should especially avoid being yourself. But McCourt shows that there's no way to teach without using personal experience. And most of all, you can't show kids how to know something without knowing who you are.

I would've liked to have seen more of his classroom dilemmas - perhaps selfishly, because I want to see how someone else solves them. McCourt is right - when you're teaching, the classroom has little to do with pedagogical theories or trends. It's relationships between individuals. And there's nowhere to hide.

This is my first audiobook in English. Thanks for inspiration @nibelungov