Teacher Man: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

One of the best books I have ever read.

McCourt's writing style is lush and cadenced. No gobbledygook. His words are lyrical and rhythmical, imaginative and bustling, a literary Willy Wonka-esque factory of grammar and diction treats.

This book explicates, completely, the life of a teacher. I relate to all his descriptions of what it's like to face a classroom with the immense duty of educating these rebellious, hormonal, indifferent teenagers. He recounts situations of troublemakers, students grieving over a dying parent or moving between divorced parents or living on violent streets or some other sad and difficult life; he remembers struggling to keep discipline and going home with endless papers to read, check, grade. This is the most truthful account of what teaching is like that I have read. Nothing in graduate school as an education student, no class, no book, no instructor, no internship - nothing - related what being a teacher is really like as does this book.

McCourt is a storyteller. He not only tells his own story as a teacher, but also the many from his life he told his students. Those stories, his story, is that of someone eager to escape his poor Irish Catholic upbringing, always trying to become something more than he is. He goes to Stuyvesant High School, planning to stay only two years, hoping to eventually work in a plush office, his days filled with meetings and flying to conventions. Instead he stays many years more, until he retires. He goes to Dublin to pursue a Ph.D., but fails to complete his dissertation. Throughout his thirty years of teaching in New York and a failed marriage, he struggles to become comfortable as a teacher and with himself, always fearing being fired, always looking to solve his life's aimlessness, always thinking he should stick to the curriculum and be more of a disciplinarian, a traditional teacher. It is not until Stuyvesant that he finds his stride, his voice, himself. There he is allowed to teach as he wishes. No administrators hound him to read literature, diagram sentences, do grammar, to give multiple choice, essay, true and false, fill-in-the-blank tests. Instead, he grades on attendance, participation, if they read their writings, if they comment on classmates' writing, on whether they are able to reflect upon the class and say what they learned, and whether they used their imaginations. He has them play music and sing recipes, read about their own lives, write food reviews of the school cafeteria, and picnic in a park. Grammar, he says, behaves like a pen. Excuses are written for Adam and Eve to God. This is the teacher man. McCourt asks his students, "What is education, anyway? What are we doing in this school?" His answer is for them to achieve freedom, and in so striving down that educational Kerouacian trek, McCourt finds his own freedom, the comfort with himself and what he became that he always wanted.

Such a discovery is a joy to read about. It is inspiring that years later he finally finds himself, a reassurance to those who are still figuring themselves out, what to become, where to go, what it all means, and how to be okay with it. McCourt was in his 50s when this happened for him, and in his 60s when he published Angela's Ashes and 'Tis.