Not as good as Angela's Ashes, better than 'Tis. McCourt is unfailingly honest about what it was like for him to teach English at four high schools and one college of varying levels of quality. Unfortunately, what it was like for him was pretty bleak. Well-trained in the Catholic art of Examining your Conscience (his words), McCourt also supplies a ready stream of insights into his personality. I can't fault him for this, but it made me sad for this Irish American who was so consistently hard on himself. What works best are the moments where he connects with his students, whether vocational students just trying not to fail high school to the brightest and best of Stuyvesant High. I came away with a higher appreciation of the struggles high school teachers face.

It's very hard to get teachers Like Frank McCourt now adays.
Great book:(

“Teacher Man” is a memoir of author Frank McCourt’s experience teaching in public high schools in New York City. Toward the end of the book, Mr. McCourt recalls telling his students, “Dreaming, wishing, planning: it’s all writing, but the difference between you and the man on the street is that you are looking at it, friends, getting it set in your head, realizing the significance of the insignificant, getting it on paper.” In “Teacher Man,” Mr. McCourt does what he encouraged his students to do: he looks at his life and teaching career, takes what may have seemed like insignificant moments, gets them on paper, and teases out their significance.

An example will help demonstrate this. At one point, in a deviation from a normal English lesson, Mr. McCourt asks his creative writing students to bring with them a cookbook to class and to read out loud their favorite recipes. The students enjoy learning new vocabulary (“gourmet”) and attempting to make the recipes more like poetry by putting them to music (a recipe for Irish soda bread is put to the tune of “The Irish Washerwoman”). The students enjoy the process so much that they ask to do it again the following two days.

If Mr. McCourt left his account there, then the reader would have a story about a funny, unorthodox English class. However, Mr. McCourt goes further by letting the reader in on all his worries about the event. He worries that his other classes will say it’s unfair that they don’t get to have musical recipe-reading. He fears that “the authorities who watch the curriculum” will be exasperated with him for neglecting traditional English education (“And singing recipes? Are you kidding us? Could you kindly explain what this has to do with the teaching of English?”). Authorities aside, he himself worries that he is not giving the students’ a proper education (“Or were you just a bloody fool, allowing yourself once again to be diverted from Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald in junior classes and Wordsworth and Coleridge in senior classes”). Against these fears, he weighs the good things that came out of it: Full class participation and that he enjoyed the class (“…hadn’t we had three days of complete class participation? And, most of all, teacher man, didn’t you enjoy yourself?”).

In honestly elaborating these thoughts, Mr. McCourt takes what might have passed as an insignificant moment and teases out of it significant questions about his relationship with his students, his administrators, and the purpose of teaching. “Teacher Man” is full of these episodes and Mr. McCourt's examinations of them. Together they form a narrative that is humorous and enjoyable to read.

Mi è piaciuto molto leggere della vita di un insegnante, delle sue insicurezze e della sua costante ricerca di un modo per coinvolgere e far interessare gli studenti alla sua materia. È stato bello ritrovare il sarcasmo di McCourt, un pó meno la sua Irlanda. Non ho apprezzato la sua vita privata, uomo discutibile.

Questo terzo libro si stacca nettamente dai due precedenti che compongono la trilogia. Non c'è una storia narrata con continuità ma una serie di aneddoti che si incastrano a puzzle nel secondo volume, che paese l'america. Appare come un resoconto sull'attività di insegnante in america del prof McCourt. Il libro scorre lento e non cattura come i precedenti. Nonostante questo, la sua lettura completa episodi della carriera di insegnante di McCourt raccontandoli sotto un diverso punto di vista.

I am glad I decided to finish this trilogy. I fell in love with the first book, left sad about the second one and again got under the spell of this, third one. I think it helped a lot that I have been listening to it (Listen! Are you listening?) on audio read by Frank McCourt himself. This is a charming, funny, sad, kind book.

This book was fine. Maybe I'm missing the point of this book, but it didn't inspire me as a teacher. It didn't make me question or evaluate my teaching practice. I'm not in awe of McCourt's teaching style or success. He has an interesting life story, as told in ANGELA's ASHES, but I find his teaching life (or at least his telling of it) unremarkable. I don't think all teachers need to have a remarkable story, but if you're going to write a book about it, you should tell more about your 30 years of teaching than just one good class where students brought in food and sang to recipes. I also find it interesting that he struggled in the classroom until he taught at a private school, where according to him, he didn't have to deal with behavioral issues.

Also heard this one read by the author on cd. Not nearly as good as 'Tis. I liked hearing about his life and the impersonations of students was somewhat amusing, if not repetitive and grating on the nerves, but I actually felt like this story was a little cheesy. It seemed like he fell back on a lot of cliches of that old standby, the uplifting story of the teacher who makes a difference. I don't think that this was at all intentional and I'm sure that he probably was as honest about his teaching as he was about everything else but it really just didn't interest as much...where was the new insight? The students could have jumped straight out of To Sir with Love...and he was just do disgruntled and depressed about his personal life that, while the teaching was what the book was supposedly about, it really seemed to play second fiddle and it didn't strike me as a story very different from any inner-city teacher (I've been there) and wasn't told in a new way. Basically, I felt like, what's the point? Did he think he was the only one who had these difficulties/experiences teaching? Too cheesy, too (surprisingly) unself-aware. Wow, that was harsh.

After falling in love with both Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, I couldn't wait to dive into Frank McCourt's third and final memoir. AA was amazing for completely different reasons, but I found myself truly drawn to Frank as a person in 'Tis when he spoke about his time teaching. Because of that, Teacher Man of course held very high expectations for me. Well, let me just say that it did not disappoint at all, and it comes as no surprise that this one is easily my favorite among the three! This book was wonderful from top to bottom. You can hear every bit of love that he has for his students as he talks about them all from the worst troublemakers to the best and brightest. I really enjoyed hearing about some of his more creative ideas and how the kids would get excited about things that no other teacher or administrator considered "proper education." I cried when he recalled meeting up with some of his students years later and the interactions that ensued. I laughed out loud at so many of the anecdotes, the remarks and quips from his students, and the rapid-fire debates that took place in Frank's classroom. I can only imagine what kind of world we might live in if all of our teachers held this kind of passion for the work and for their students.

I wish I had had Frank McCourt as a teacher. His book chronicles his years as a high school English/Writing teacher...from his first frightened, inexperienced years to his competent yet still-uncertain years. He shares with us what he has learned from other teachers and, more importantly, from his students. My favorite part of the book was the last line in Chapter 17 and the first line in Chapter 18.

Ah... a book only English teachers could love. It's not for the faint of heart.

McCourt deals so well with the inner lives of English teachers. How we second guess ourselves, get embarrassed by superiors on not having read enough of the "right literature", fear kids will think we're either too strict or too relaxed, wonder if they'll ever respect us, pray they don't go off about how reading is not relevant to their lives.

He nails it.

Reader be warned though. I found myself laughing hysterically in many parts, but there were other areas where his tortured Irish Catholic background proved a bit much in terms of language and description of other things.

You pity him for his constant lack of courage and how his childhood shaped his dismally poor moral framework. But I suppose in the end reading things like this help you develop empathy even if you disagree with their choices.

Wow. I loved this book. LOVED it. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a good teacher memoir.

McCourt got the Pulitzer for Angela's Ashes, and he didn't write it until he was 63. Until then he'd been teaching. And he was (negatively) categorized as such.

McCourt epitomizes teachers in this book, and he humorously documents the challenges we all face.