Here they come.
And I'm not ready.
How could I be?
I'm a new teacher and learning on the job.
On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City.
Description:
Description:
I think these introductory sentences to Frank McCourt's Teacher Man are the perfect words to pull readers into this delightful memoir. Immediately, you are presented with author McCourt's fear of the first day of school, his not-so-understated terror of being ill-prepared and unqualified, along with teasers about outrageous events that occurred on his first two days. With the statement that McCourt taught school for thirty years, any reader interested in schools and teachers must lick their lips in anticipation of reading many, many more stories about his unusual adventures in the classroom.
Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go around the back. They are congratulated on having ATTO (All That Time Off). They are spoken of patronizingly and patted, retroactively, on their silvery locks....Dream on, teacher. You will not be celebrated.
And what adventures he has. After a bit of background from his first 27 years of life as an Irish immigrant, McCourt starts his teaching career in inner-city schools due to his lack of experience. There they call him "Teacher Man." He finds the only way to get through each period and keep the kids' attention is to tell them stories of his youth in Ireland. Not exactly a topic on the curriculum for vocational schools, but he survives for awhile until he just gives up and tries to pursue an advanced degree in Ireland at a Protestant university (he's Catholic) with not too surprising of results.
Finally he lands a job in a prestigious school, one of the best in New York and maybe the country, where students are motivated and preparing for major tests towards their hoped-for acceptance into top Ivy League colleges. Needless to say, his Irish stories and tendency to be distracted into unconventional tangents again land him in hot water. His classes are extremely popular, but he wonders whether it is because he's such a great teacher or because he is such a pushover grader and wandering lecturer? And worst of all, he cannot fulfill the principal's expressed direction to show students how to diagram sentences (which McCourt had never come close to mastering). He soon finds there are other problems with teaching.
If you asked all the students in your five classes to write three hundred and fifty words each then you had 175 multiplied by 350 and that was 43,750 words you had to read, correct, evaluate and grade on evenings and weekends. That's if you were wise enough to give them only one assignment per week....If you gave each paper a bare five minutes you'd spend, on this one set of papers, fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes.
His lessons include a disastrous field trip to a questionable film where the students are boisterous and refuse to leave when the movie is over. Then there is "the art of the excuse note" where students get to create, read, and discuss excuse notes they write which are supposed to be from their parents. There is the lesson where everyone brings in a cookbook and reads or sings a recipe, often accompanied by another student and instrument. And, of course, there is his fallback lesson of his stories told in his wonderful Irish brogue.
Sprinkled into his reflective narrative are encounters with various personalities, from his wife to administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and some very challenging students. He needs to get the attention of each of these people in different ways, but has only varying success, blaming himself for not handling situations and encounters better. Like when he ate one student's sandwich in class. Or when he struck another in the face with a rolled up magazine. Or when he called a student's parents with a report of misbehavior and learned the father had severely beaten the student as punishment.
In all, he taught in five high schools and one college, including a vocational and technical high school and a high school of fashion industries.
My arithmetic tells me that about twelve thousand boys and girls, men and women, sat at desks and listened to me lecture, chant, encourage, rumble, sing, declaim, recite, preach, dry up. I think of the twelve thousand and wonder what I did for them. Then I think of what they did for me.
Those of us who were at one time (brief for me) teachers can identify with many of the situations and students McCourt describes. But with his direct, honest writing style, McCourt relays this information about his world of education so clearly that probably anyone could feel his self-doubt and lack of expertise in handling the daily challenges that arise in Teacher Man. A strong, sensitive, and funny memoir.
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Cordell, Esme Raji. Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year.
The daily memories of a creative, off-beat novice teacher in an inner city school. Delightfully, passionately written with plenty of observations about her students, administration, and wonderful projects she gives to her students, including building and using a time machine in her class and having her students shout, "Play ball!" after the national anthem is piped in daily over the school intercom. Wonderful. (previously reviewed here)
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