I can honestly say that I wish I hadn't read this book. I suppose it answers, indirectly, the puzzling question I've always had over why students & teachers "hook-up", but I don't think that was the premise of this book. I wish I could scour from my brain cells the images left there thanks to having read this book. So many other things I could have done with my time...

This book doesn't fall into my normal type of readings. That doesn't account for the low rating though. I needed to read this for my book club (I know I sound like I have to justify why I read this book, sorry). I love my book club, because I get to read books I normally wouldn't, at least not right away.

I didn't like this book for a number of reasons. Frank McCourt's writing didn't appeal to me. Most of the book seemed like one long diatribe about how sucky it was to be a teacher. A lot of us know that teachers are underpaid and not appreciated, but they are needed more than anything. I just don't want to read about it for a least two hundred pages. To me it seemed like McCourt wanted an audience to his frustrations. I get that... but, don't also describe how bad of a teacher you were. That wont gain you any sympathy points either.

What I did like was the sections about some of the students he taught. I wish there could have been more for me to enjoy. I wont let this keep me from reading other biographies. I don't want to be elitist in my book selections.

Cuốn này mình thấy không hay như mong đợi lắm. Chắc bởi mình thấy mấy chuyện tác giả kể cũng thường thường, hoặc do nhà mình cũng liên quan một tí đến giáo dục.
Đọc cứ thấy lê thê, dài dòng không đáng có nên mình drop luôn.

“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.

After "Angela's Ashes", one simply cannot help but continue reading the memoirs of this uniquely touching Irishman and/or American.
Returning to America after an infinitely sad childhood spent (first in America) in Ireland, McCourt went to serve in the military and then enrolled at New York University and became an English teacher. A New York public school teacher.
And that's where another story about his life begins. The story of a teacher man who will struggles with the class management, syllabus completion, surviving that 1968.
Asking himself how to motivate American teenagers? How to interest them in grammar and literature, poetry? How do you inspire them to start writing?
With love, patience, experimentation. Because all of us teachers have to find our own way, path, key that opens the sometimes well-locked door of attention and interest of our students. In McCourt’s classroom of English literature and creative writing, students will write kitchen recipes, which they will then read aloud, accompanied by the sounds of their classmates’ musical instruments. They will learn that the English triffle recipe does not go with the sounds of a bongo drum, and that the Benedict Egg recipe is best read with the sounds of a violin.
And along the way, he will tell them his life story in Ireland.
For some of them, this teacher will remain forever in their memory, for some he will save their lives in a way, for some he will inspire and encourage them. Because on the blackboard in his classroom, to the left is written FEAR and then the arrow goes to FREEDOM: FEAR ➡️ FREEDOM. That is what he wanted: to free them from any fear, personal, artistic, creative, professional, fear of life.
Whoever, like me, is engaged in this profession, cannot help but fall in love with this somewhat strange insecure and yet fascinatingly interesting and original teacher.
At one point, he decides to take up the academic career, but unaware of how much he loves his job / students, he leaves his long-dreamed PhD studies at Trinity College in Dublin and returns to his New York classrooms. His wife doesn't understand that. A divorce follows. He lives miserably. And when he becomes a famous writer, which he describes at the very beginning of the book, he remains modest, normal. How can you not love him?
And how can you not feel the yearning to sit in his classroom, at least for a moment...

Loved this book, great spirit to it like Frank McCourt’s other books, and alive with his storytelling spirit (all of which comes out that much richer listening to the audio version, read by McCourt).

Some favorite excerpts I want to remember, and that might catch folks’ interest in the book:

Ch. 1:

• On vocational education: “Vocational schools were seen by many as dumping grounds for students ill-equipped for academic high schools. That was snobbery. It didn’t matter to the public that thousands of young people wanted to be auto mechanics, beauticians, machinists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters. They didn’t want to be bothered with the Reformation, the War of 1812, Walt Whitman, art appreciation, the sex life of the fruit fly.

But, man, if we have to do it we’ll do it. We’ll sit in those classes that have nothing to do with our lives. We’ll work in our shops where we learn about the real world and we’ll try to be nice to the teachers and get outa here in four years. Whew!”

• The amazing sandwich story: “The problem of the sandwich started when a boy named Petey called out, Anyone wan’ a baloney sandwich?

You kiddin’? Your mom must hate you, givin’ you sandwiches like that.

Petey threw his brown-paper sandwich bag at the critic, Andy, and the class cheered. Fight, fight, they said. Fight, fight. The bag landed on the floor between the blackboard and Andy’s front-row desk.

I came from behind my desk and made the first sound of my teaching career: Hey. Four years of higher education at New York University and all I could think of was Hey.

The problem of the sandwich started when a boy named Petey called out, Anyone wan’ a baloney sandwich?

You kiddin’? Your mom must hate you, givin’ you sandwiches like that.

Petey threw his brown-paper sandwich bag at the critic, Andy, and the class cheered. Fight, fight, they said. Fight, fight. The bag landed on the floor between the blackboard and Andy’s front-row desk.

I came from behind my desk and made the first sound of my teaching career: Hey. Four years of higher education at New York University and all I could think of was Hey.

I said it again. Hey.

They ignored me. They were busy promoting the fight that would kill time and divert me from any lesson I might be planning. I moved toward Petey and made my first teacher statement, Stop throwing sandwiches. Petey and the class looked startled. This teacher, new teacher, just stopped a good fight. New teachers are supposed to mind their own business or send for the principal or a dean and everyone knows it’s years before they come. Which means you can have a good fight while waiting. Besides, what are you gonna do with a teacher who tells you stop throwing sandwiches when you already threw the sandwich?

Benny called out from the back of the room. Hey, teach, he awredy threw the sangwidge. No use tellin’ him now don’t throw the sangwidge. They’s the sangwidge there on the floor.

The class laughed...

Professors of education at New York University never lectured on how to handle flying-sandwich situations. They talked about theories and philosophies of education, about moral and ethical imperatives, about the necessity of dealing with the whole child, the gestalt, if you don’t mind, the child’s felt needs, but never about critical moments in the classroom.

Should I say, Hey, Petey, get up here pick up that sandwich, or else? Should I pick it up myself and throw it into the wastepaper basket to show my contempt for people who throw sandwiches while millions starve all over the world?

They had to recognize I was boss, that I was tough, that I’d take none of their shit.

The sandwich, in wax paper, lay halfway out of the bag and the aroma told me there was more to this than baloney. I picked it up and slid it from its wrapping. It was not any ordinary sandwich where meat is slapped between slices of tasteless white American bread. This bread was dark and thick, baked by an Italian mother in Brooklyn, bread firm enough to hold slices of a rich baloney, layered with slices of tomato, onions and peppers, drizzled with olive oil and charged with a tongue-dazzling relish.

I ate the sandwich.

They gawked up at me, thirty-four boys and girls, average age sixteen. I could see the admiration in their eyes, first teacher in their lives to pick up a sandwich from the floor and eat it in full view. Sandwich man. In my boyhood in Ireland we admired one schoolmaster who peeled and ate an apple every day and rewarded good boys with the long peel. These kids watched the oil dribble down my chin to my two-dollar tie from Klein-on-the-Square.

Petey said, Yo, teacher, that’s my sandwich you et.

Class told him, Shaddap. Can’t you see the teacher is eating?

I licked my fingers. I said, Yum, made a ball of paper bag and wax paper and flipped it into the trash basket. The class cheered. Wow, they said, and Yo, baby, and M-a-a-a-n. Look at dat. He eats the sandwich. He hits the basket. Wow…

My students smiled till they saw the principal’s face framed in the door window. Bushy black eyebrows halfway up his forehead shaped a question. He opened the door and beckoned me out. A word, Mr. McCourt?

Petey whispered, Hey, mister. Don’t worry about the sandwich. I didn’t want it anyway.

The class said, Yeah, yeah, in a way that showed they were on my side if I had trouble with the principal, my first experience of teacher-student solidarity.”

Ch. 13:

• Cookbook teaching: “Susan Gilman never raises her hand. Everything is too urgent. No use telling her calling out is against the rules. She brushes that aside. Who cares? She wants you to know she’s discovered your game. I know why you want us to read these recipes out loud like this.

You do?

Because they look like poetry on the page and some of them read like poetry. I mean they’re even better than poetry because you can taste them. And, wow, the Italian recipes are pure music.

Maureen McSherry chimes in. The other thing I like about the recipes is you can read them the way they are without pain-in-the-ass English teachers digging for the deeper meaning.

All right, Maureen, we’ll get back to that sometime.

What?

The pain-in-the-ass English teachers digging for meaning.

Michael Carr says he has his flute with him and if anyone would like to recite or sing a recipe he’ll play with them. Brian looks skeptical. He says, Are you kidding? Play your flute with a recipe? Are we going crazy in this class? Susan tells him can it and offers to read a recipe for lasagna with Michael backing her up. While she reads a recipe for Swedish meatballs he plays “Hava Negila,” a melody that has nothing to do with Swedish meatballs, and the class goes from giggling to serious listening to applause and congratulations. James says they should take it on the road and call themselves The Meatballs or The Recipes and offers to be their agent as he is going into accounting. When Maureen reads a recipe for Irish soda bread Michael plays “The Irish Washerwoman” to a tapping and a clacking around the room.

The class is alive. They tell one another this is wild, the very idea of reading recipes, reciting recipes, singing recipes with Michael adjusting his flute to French, English, Spanish, Jewish, Irish, Chinese recipes.”

• On self examination: “Maybe you could find a way of enjoying yourself less. You were always ingenious at making yourself miserable and you don’t want to lose the touch. Maybe you could try again to teach diagramming or grub for deeper meanings? You could inflict Beowulf and the Chronicles on your suffering adolescents. What about your grand program of self-improvement, Mr. Polymath? Look at your life outside the school. You belong nowhere. Periphery man. You have no wife, and a child you rarely see. No vision, no plan, no goal. Just amble to the crypt, man. Fade and leave no legacy but memories of a man who turned his classroom into a playground, a rap session and a group-therapy forum.

Why not? What the hell. What are schools for anyway? I ask you, is it the task of the teacher to supply canon fodder for the military-industrial complex? Are we shaping packages for the corporate assembly line?

Ooh, aren’t we getting solemn, and where did I leave my soapbox? Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens. Let there be no caterwauling. Sing no sad songs for me. No weeping at the bar.

I am called before the court, accused of leading a double life. To wit: that in the c lassroom I enjoy myself and deny my students a proper education while I toss nightly on my celibate cot and wonder, God help us, what it’s all about.

I must congratulate myself, in passing, for never having lost the ability to examine my conscience, never having lost the gift of finding myself wanting and defective. Why fear the criticism of others when you, yourself, are first out of the critical gate? If self-denigration is the race I am the winner, even before the starting gun. Collect the bets.”

Ch. 15:

• the Korean grocer & the Polish-Jewish delicatessen man: “He stayed an hour in the professor’s office, talking and crying, the professor saying it was OK, he had a father he thought was a mean son-of-a-bitch Polish Jew, forgetting that that mean son-of-a-bitch survived Auschwitz and made his way to California and raised the professor and two other kids, ran a delicatessen in Santa Barbara, every organ in his body threatening to collapse, undermined in the camp. The professor said their two fathers would have a lot to talk about but that would never happen. The Korean grocer and the Polish-Jewish delicatessen man could never find the words that come so easily in a university. Ken said a huge weight was lifted in the professor’s office. Or you could say all kinds of poison had flowed out of his system. Something like that…

He kept thinking of one remark of the professor’s, that the world should let the Polish-Jewish father and the Korean father sit in the sun with their wives, if they were lucky enough to have them. Ken laughed over how excited the professor became. Just let them sit in the goddam sun. But the world won’t let them because there’s nothing more dangerous than letting old farts sit in the sun. They might be thinking.”

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.

McCourt has a compelling style of writing, an extraordinarily masculine style (I don't know what this means exactly, but if I were ever to try to pin down what I thought made for "masculine" writing, I'd definitely look at McCourt's book, if only to avoid the traditional recourse to Hemingway). One thing that was nice about it was that it was a memoir that happened to be about a period in his life when he was a teacher -- i.e. that happened to be about teaching. It clearly wasn't a "teacher memoir" in the traditional sense.

McCourt came off as a compelling teacher, because he is almost certainly a compelling storyteller and a compelling person to listen to. It was clear he did some good things in his classroom. But, to me at least, he didn't seem as annoyingly perfect or pedantic as other teachers I read in teacher school. He also (refreshingly) refuses to analyze or justify many of his most compelling (and strange) moments of pedagogy. There were almost certainly students who were ill-served by McCourt and who couldn't stand him. There were also years when I imagine he wasn't a very good teacher. And, of course, there were surely many students he made a great impact on and many more who dearly loved him.

In the end what drove this forward was the mixture of classic teacher-man stories (think Dead Poet Society) and McCourt's brisk, snappy sections of teacher/student dialog.

I guess I also fundamentally share McCourt's main teaching insight, which is that it's hard to represent "the system", that it makes sense when kids resist authority and that often you most sympathize (and even like) the very kids you have to reprimand for wasting the class's time.

Okuduktan sonra Türkçe öğretmeni olan bir arkadaşıma önerip verdiğim ve geri alamadığım kitaplarımdan biri. Düşünüyorum da böyle böyle ne çok kitabım gitmiş!

Öğretmenlerin karşılaşacağı tuhaf durumları, idarecilerin kaoslar karşısındaki tutarsızlıklarını, meslek deneyimlerini, gülerek okuduğum sınıf yönetimi ve yazım kurallarını öğrencilere öğretme tekniklerini hatırlıyorum kitaptan.Eğitici ve eğlenceli olduğu kadar, yazarın yaşam öyküsünün paralelinde ilgiyle, keyifle okunuyor.

No puede no gustarme un libro escrito por este hombre. Lo mío con McCourt es algo personal, viene de hace muchos años y es como si lo conociera de toda la vida, como si fuera un familiar o un amigo muy cercano. Creo que todo el mundo debería leer al menos una vez en la vida "Las cenizas de Ángela", y estoy segura de que después no podría dejar de leer todos los libros que le siguieran. Frank McCourt es especial y te hace sentir especial a ti. Te hace pensar, sentir y replantearte prácticamente todos los aspectos relevantes de tu existencia. Para mí, un autor imprescindible.

i'm fascinated, as usual by the negative reviews of this book. ive never read anything that spoke to me about teaching the way this book did, and about the rest of the stuff we're all to deal with in general. perhaps the people who dont get it arent rebels at heart...perhaps they are individuals who havent had a boss scold them or perhaps theyve just always felt in control. but i am grateful for this book, and moreso for frank mc court writing about everything he chose to detail in all three, angela's ashes, tis, and teacher man with the voice with which he chose to portray them - humor. its humor, its all humor, which apparently some people didnt get...

im sure we all gravitate towards books that speak about our own experiences and from our own view point. so other than not being irish, ive dealt with alcholic loved ones, and being misunderstood and fired at work, and mostly, teaching the hardest population to teach, which i do in juvenile hall and camp in los angeles.

after wondering about how long it was going to be so hard...i found my copy of teacher man and skimmed through it - there it was, the scene about what you find in the classroom with the doo-whoppers in the back of the room singing...as nowadays we have "rappers" who not only constantly rap, but beat on the desk. and of course my favorite, the story of the sandwich on his first day, AND getting scolded by the principal, AND then bonding with his students over it. exactly which part of this book didn't people get? and condescending it certainly IS NOT. I LOVE YOU FRANK MC COURT, FOR GIVING ME PEACE OF MIND AND REMINDING ME THAT I SHOULD ALWAYS, ALWAYS WALK INTO THAT CLASSROOM WITH MY SENSE OF HUMOR IN TACT. Any teacher who walks in the room with out one, well you might think you are a "grand" teacher, but in the end, the best teachers are the ones who simply love their students, therefore love being a teacher.

especially an english teacher because the meaning is always more important than the spelling or punctuation...

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.