I just wiped tears from my eyes as I finished this book. Frank McCourt is a genius of story-telling. He is able to perfectly describe the trials and tribulations of being an inner-city teacher with a human approach. This should be required reading for anyone who has aspirations of being a teacher or has ever been in a classroom. Education today is rapidly changing and it seems like the focus is on test scores, data, technology and less on being an actual human teacher. Stories, questions, creativity, discussions, connections. This is what improves test scores. MacCourt connects with the students like when he has them bring in food from their home to share with the class. They end up writing a "cook book" with all the recipes. Yes, they learned about reading AND writing. To be honest, it can be difficult to keep up the spark that a new teacher has. "But if you hang on you learn the tricks. It's hard but you have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish. The airlines tell you if oxygen fails you are to put on your mask first, even if your instinct is to save the child." If I didn't take care of my self, I would have quit 7 years ago. Yes, I will one day leave the classroom. I love the young humans I come into contact with who I teach and teach me as well. I know that this is what I am meant to do.....for now.

Every moment of your life, you're writing. Even in your dreams you're writing.

what a humbling one. i like how straight to the point, unabashed he was about every aspect of teaching that can easily turn into a nightmare. i have yet to teach a classroom of high school students, the most terrifying creatures on earth, but god am i ready for it to be difficult and chaotic. i have very much enjoyed these idealistic, romanticised versions of teachers in media that become saviours and gods to their lost high school students, and this book most definitely wasn't that, and yet it felt just as inspiring, even more.

our teacher asked us, "did the book touch your heart? that's what this was about." and yeah, it certainly did. your students may hate you, dislike you, never remember a word you say to them, but that's how it's going to be sometimes. when he stops seeking their worshipping he becomes a much better teacher, willing to give only what he can offer and i think that's the necessary mindset to have.

during most of the book, he finds himself lost, professionally, personally, spiritually. much of his questioning resonated with me. while we clearly have had different formative experiences, i think he easily establishes a sense of solidarity with the reader when he asks "what was there to write about?" after spending more than half of the book getting his students to write about absolutely anything.

this book has brought a lot of reflection, perspective and even some comfort for me. i really enjoyed it and would recommend it.

Almost As Good As "Angela's Ashes"

McCourties of the world rejoice! You have nothing to lose but your tears of woe anticipating when he'd return with his next book; the foremost memoirist of our time is back. Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man" is a spellbinding lyrical ode to the craft of teaching. It is a rollicking, delightful trek across nearly thirty years in New York City public school classrooms that will surely please his devout legion of fans, and perhaps win some new admirers too. Truly, without question, it is a splendid concluding volume in his trilogy of memoirs that began in spectacular fashion with "Angela's Ashes". Indeed, we find much of the same plain, yet rather poetic, prose and rich dark humor that defines his first book, along with his undiminished, seemingly timeless, skill as a mesmerizing raconteur. Is McCourt truly now one of the great writers of our time if he isn't already, with the publication of "Teacher Man"? I will say only that he was a marvellous teacher (I still feel lucky to have been a prize-winning student of his.), and that this new memoir truly captures the spirit of what it was like to be a student in his classroom.

"Teacher Man" opens with a hilarious Prologue that would seem quite self-serving if written by someone other than Frank McCourt, in which he reviews his star-struck existence in the nine years since the original publication of "Angela's Ashes". In Part I (It's a Long Road to Pedagogy) he dwells on the eight years he spent at McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island. It starts, promisingly enough, with him on the verge of ending his teaching career, just as it begins in the lawless Wild West frontier of a McKee classroom (I was nearly in stitches laughing out loud, after learning why he was nearly fired on two consecutive days, no less.). Frank manages to break every rule learned in his Education courses at New York University, but he succeeds in motivating his students, raising the craft of excuse note writing to a high literary art. He finds time too to fall in love with his first wife, Alberta Small, and then earn a M. A. degree in English from Brooklyn College.

Part II (Donkey on a Thistle) has the funniest tale; an unbelievable odyssey to a Times Square movie theater with Frank as chaperone to an unruly tribe of thirty Seward Park High School girls. But before we get there, we're treated to a spellbinding account of his all too brief time as an adjunct lecturer of English at Brooklyn's New York Community College, and of another short stint at Fashion Industries High School, where he receives a surprising, and poignant, reminder from his past. Soon Frank will forsake high school teaching, sail off to Dublin, and enroll in a doctoral program at Trinity College, in pursuit of a thesis on Irish-American literature. But, that too fails, and with Alberta pregnant, he accepts an offer to become a substitute teacher at prestigious Stuyvesant High School (The nation's oldest high school devoted to the sciences and mathematics; its alumni now include four Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, medicine and economics; for more information please look at my ABOUT ME section, or at history at www.stuy.edu or famous alumni at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High... or Notables at www.ourstrongband.org.).

Surprisingly, Part III (Coming Alive in Room 205) is the shortest section of "Teacher Man". After having spent fifteen years teaching at Stuyvesant High School, you'd think that this would be this memoir's longest section, replete with many tales rich in mirth (Room 205, located a few doors from the principal's office, was Frank's room throughout his years teaching full-time at Stuyvesant High School.). Indeed I'm surprised that it is so brief. Yet there is still ample fodder for Frank's lyrical prose to dwell on, most notably a hilarious episode on cookbooks and how he taught his creative writing class to write recipes for them. He describes with equal doses of hilarity and eloquence, his unique style of teaching at Stuyvesant, which he compares and contrasts with math teachers Philip Fisher and Edward Marcantonio - the dark and good sides of Stuyvesant mathematics education in the 1970s and 1980s (I was a student of both and will let the reader decide who was my teacher while I was a student in Frank's creative writing class.) - but he still implies that his students were having the most fun.

Will "Teacher Man" earn the same critical acclaim bestowed upon "Angela's Ashes"? Who knows? Is it deserving of it? I think the answer is a resounding yes. Regardless, Frank's many devout fans - his flock of McCourties - will cherish this book as yet another inspirational tale from the foremost memoirist of our time.

(EDITORIAL NOTE 7/22/09: Elsewhere online I posted this tribute to my favorite high school teacher, and I think it is worth noting here:

I've been fortunate to have had many fine teachers in high school, college and graduate school, but there was no one like Frank McCourt. Without a doubt, he was the most inspirational, most compelling, and the funniest, teacher I ever had. I am still grateful to him for instilling in me a life-long love of literature and a keen interest in writing prose. Am still amazed that he encouraged me to enter a citywide essay contest on New York City's waterfront, and would, more than a year later, in my senior yearbook acknowledge my second prize award by thanking me for winning him money (His was also, not surprisingly, the most eloquent set of comments I had inscribed in my yearbook from teachers.). He is gone now, but I am sure that for me, and for many of my fellow alumni of his Stuyvesant High School classes, he will live in our hearts and minds for the rest of our lives.)

(Resposted from my 2005 Amazon review)

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"

The 3rd book of the Frank McCourt series is an inspiring book about his 30 year teaching career. It describes how he found his voice by teaching Creative Writing and all of the other classes he taught in the many different schools he taught. It was in the last school he taught as a teacher for creative writing, after 30 years of teaching, that was instrumental for him write his first highly popular book, Angela's Ashes about his childhood in Ireland. I recommend this book as part of the series of his life.

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.

Já conheço o nome de Frank McCourt há algum tempo (tenho "As Cinzas de Ângela" por ler), mas até agora ainda não tinha lido nenhum livro dele, pelo que este "O Professor" foi a minha estreia neste autor. Frank McCourt publicou 3 livros autobiográficos durante a sua vida (mais um livro de Natal), tendo vindo a falecer em Julho deste ano.

"O Professor" aborda a vida de professor de Frank McCourt e todas as dificuldades que passou até finalmente conseguir perceber que era mesmo aquilo que gostava de fazer, ao longo dos 30 anos durante os quais leccionou. Frank vai muito jovem da sua terra natal, a Irlanda, para os Estados Unidos e depois de algum tempo a trabalhar numas docas enquanto estudava consegue finalmente uma colocação como professor.

Nos primeiros tempos, Frank sente muitas dificuldades em captar a atenção dos alunos e apenas consegue fazê-lo quando conta histórias da sua infância na Irlanda. O passar dos anos foi-lhe trazendo alguma segurança, e permitiu ao mesmo tempo que aplicasse os seus peculiares métodos pedagógicos nas aulas de Escrita Criativa que leccionou. Não só a escrita é despretensiosa, como é também despretensiosa e humilde a forma como Frank McCourt fala do sucesso que os seus métodos de ensino tiveram. Isto porque estamos perante um homem que tentou sempre fazer aquilo que lhe parecia melhor, na vida como no emprego, apesar de todas as suas inseguranças e defeitos e de ter cometido alguns erros que o ensinaram o que precisava de aprender. Pessoalmente, achei a história deste homem interessantíssima (pelo menos no período que nos é relatada), também porque muitas vezes consegui identificar-me com os sentimentos de insegurança e procura de vocação que descreve. Quanto aos métodos de ensino, para além das suas peculiaridades, estes tinham sempre por base a ideia de que é possível fazer alguma coisa de todos os alunos, por mais desesperado que pareça o caso... basta tentar compreendê-lo e descobrir como pode ser motivado. E essa é uma ideia que me agrada bastante.

Isto para dizer que foi uma leitura que me agradou imenso e que recomendo vivamente.

I really loved Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, but Teacher Man, Frank McCourt's third book, was easily my favourite. Part of it was that, brilliant as they are, his first two book are heavy going. I was exhausted at the end of each one. Glad I had read them, but even more glad that we were at the end. His childhood was hard and depressing and something no one should have to go through, but I'd finish each book feeling almost overwhelmed by the fact that his childhood was (unfortunately) not uncommon. Countless people have experienced something similar. He wrote about it in a way that most of us could probably only dream of, and they are beautiful books that I recommend everyone read, but I was so pleased that we got to finish the story here.

This book focuses entirely on his teaching career, lessons taught and learned. It's is wonderfully written, as is to be expected, but this one also felt lighter, a bit freer. There is still darkness and self doubt and plenty of difficult things, but he is now at a point where he is doing something he is good at (even if he worries that he isn't good at it) and has a purpose in his life. I finished this feeling so pleased that he became a teacher, and even more pleased that he decided to write about it.
I can think of few thing (that are not life threatening), that intimidate me more than the idea of having to stand in front of a class of teenagers and try to teach them, have them listen and understand. As I think a lot of people are being reminded as they take over schooling during lockdown, not everyone can teach -- and it's even harder to be a good teacher. As ever, I appreciated Frank McCourt's frankness here - the things that worked, the things that didn't, the self-doubt, the days when you just don't care. But also the highs of a discussion where everyone participates, that breakthrough moment in helping someone to understand, the moments that make it worthwhile.

I had delayed starting this book because I wasn't sure I felt like reading another heavy volume, however stunning the writing may be. I simply wasn't in the mood to feel such despair toward humanity -- I only have to look at the news right now to feel that! For whatever reason though, I did start reading this, and it was a lovely addition to my day. I spent a lot of time thinking about the excellent teachers I have been lucky enough to have over the years and also a lot of time being grateful for the book I was holding. It turned out to be the perfect book to read right now, for me at least, and I'm very thankful that I had a copy with me.

Highly recommended, but make sure you read Angela's Ashes first, then 'Tis, then this one.

There is no other way of seeing McCourt than as a master and genius. He has such a unique and wonderful and engaging writing style. I felt all the joys and frustrations of being a teacher right alongside him, although I’ve never been a teacher. To think he spent his life with high school kids that I’d probably have choked to death - then went on to write three PERFECT books in his 60s and 70s. Wow. This was a great book. No surprise.

I tried to make it through this book, but couldn't. As endearing as a memoir about an Irish-immigrant teacher in New York sounded, I was put off by his at first minimal, and later building and consistent sexualization of young women in his classroom. To read descriptions of him, an at the time 27 year old teacher, admiring his 14-18 year old students' breasts, was inappropriate and nauseating. For him to THEN back it up explaining that it couldn't be helped given the young womens' appearances made me decide to put the book down for good. I've read enough books and seen enough movies to be tired and disgusted by the trope of the older male educator deriving sexual pleasure from his younger female students. I don't need to read a memoir about it. No thank you.

A side note: Frank McCourt (1930-2009) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America in 1949. For thirty years he taught in New York City high schools. His first book, "Angela's Ashes," won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for Exemplary Service in the Field of the Arts and the United Federation of Teachers John Dewey Award for Excellence in Education.

There are teacher and then there are the kind of teacher that Frank McCourt was. Here he tells of his 30-year career teaching English in New York City high schools. He was scared to death on his first day…and who wouldn’t be, facing a room of 16-year-olds at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, where his job was to teach five English classes per day to teenagers who were never expected to go any higher than 12th grade…if that. The year was 1958 and Frank McCourt was 27 years old and just out of New York University himself. One doesn’t have to be a teacher to appreciate his account of how reading the students’ obviously self-authored absence excuses inspired him to create a composition assignment they couldn’t resist: write a note of excuse from Adam to God. I would have loved to have tacked that one. At 38, he left for a doctoral program at Dublin’s Trinity College, returning two years later without a degree. That is a story for another book. He relates two of his most memorable teaching experiences… a vocabulary lesson involving a picnic in the park with ethnic foods brought by students in his creative-writing class, and a recipe-as-poetry class in which students read recipes aloud to the accompaniment of assorted musical instruments. As I said there are teachers and then there are teachers like Frank McCourt. If you read his memoirs’ you’ll be more than just entertained…you’ll be enlightened.

This was a random re-read for me (left my book at home, and grabbed it from my classroom closet!), but I’m glad I read it again. Frank McCourt is one of my all-time favorite authors/memoirists. It’s humbling to see that he, too, began in the classroom. This final installment of his life story makes me wonder what things I still have left in me outside of it.