Teacher Man

“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. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long.”

Fittingly for a memoir about teaching, McCourt begins with his first day on the job. The style is light and engaging, opening with the intriguing anecdote that he was almost fired, not once, but twice in his first two days. It also introduces what will be one of the book’s main themes: learning by experience. He admits to learning on the job, a process that took many years.

“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.”

This is a message that McCourt repeats a number of times: He was on his own. His teacher education meant little in the real world, as he didn’t learn how to deal with classroom management, conferences with parents, and many other things. This contributes to the book’s theme of learning from experience, which is how he eventually absorbs everything he comes to know about teaching.

“If I could travel to my twenty-seventh year, my first teaching year, I’d take me out for a steak, a baked potato, a pint of stout. I’d give myself a good talking to. For Christ’s sake, kid, straighten up. Throw back those miserable bony shoulders. Stop mumbling. Speak up. Stop putting yourself down. In that department the world will be happy to oblige. You’re starting your teaching career, and it isn’t an easy life. I know. I did it. You’d be better off as a cop. At least you’d have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth. If you don’t learn to love it, you’ll wriggle in a corner of hell.”

This passage also touches on the theme of learning from experience, as McCourt writes that he changed over time and learned so much from his teaching years. He wishes he could go back and give advice to the nervous, uncertain teacher he was at the start. His last line here about learning to love it echoes the advice he gives a young teacher just before his retirement in Chapter 17: “Find what you love and do it” (255). This suggests that passion for the role is, for McCourt, the defining characteristic of a teacher.

“What would I do? How would I sit? What would I say? I was having a drink with the most beautiful girl in Manhattan, who probably slept every night with that professor. That was my Calvary, thinking of her with him. Men in Chumley’s looked at me and envied me and I knew what they were thinking. Who is that miserable specimen with that beautiful girl, that knockout, that stunner? Yeah, maybe I was her brother or cousin. No, even that was unlikely. I wasn’t good-looking enough even to be her third or fourth cousin.”

This passage is about his first date with June Somers, a classmate from his education class at New York University. It shows his self-deprecating writing style—poking fun of himself—and his great lack of confidence as a young man. This deep insecurity is a trait he carries into the classroom, which he struggles to overcome.

“When I told stories about the docks they looked at me in a different way. One boy said it was funny to think you had a teacher up there that worked like real people and didn’t come from college just talking about books and all. He used to think he’d like to work on the piers, too, because of all the money you make on overtime and little deals here and there with the dropped broken goods but his father said he’d break his ass, ha ha, and you didn’t talk back to your father in an Italian family. His father said, If this Irishman can get to be a teacher, so can you, Ronnie, so can you. So forget the docks. You might make money but what good is that when you can’t straighten your back?”

Here McCourt describes how he initially connected with his students at McKee. They both came from similar blue-collar backgrounds, and the students were surprised to learn he’d had a job that many in their own families did. This made him more relatable and credible, giving him more authority in the classroom. The fact that he was an immigrant, and thus considered an outsider to many Americans, was another commonality he sometimes shared with the students.

“Long after my teaching days I scribble numbers on pieces of paper, and I’m impressed by what they mean. In New York I taught in five different high schools and one college: McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Staten Island; the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan; Seward Park High School in Manhattan; Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; night classes at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan; New York Community College in Brooklyn. I taught by day, by night, and in summer school. My arithmetic tells me that about twelve thousand boys and girls, men and women, sat at desks and listened to me lecture, chant, encourage, ramble, 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.

The arithmetic tells me I conducted at least thirty-three thousand classes.

Thirty-three thousand classes in thirty years: days, nights, summers.”

These calculations give the reader the big picture of McCourt’s long teaching career. It should be noted that they reflect only time in the classroom; elsewhere he writes about the countless hours spent at home grading papers. It illustrates that his life really was consumed by his job. He wonders what he did for the students, and if he had an impact upon them. He does know, however, the large impact they had on him. This reflects the centrality of the student–teacher relationship for McCourt, which is part of the theme of the purpose of education.

“There are days I’d love to walk out of here, slam the door behind me, tell the principal [to] shove this job up his arse, head down the hill to the ferry, sail to Manhattan, walk the streets, have a beer and a hamburger at the White Horse, sit in Washington Square, watch luscious NYU coeds saunter by, forget McKee Vocational and Technical High School forever. Forever. It’s clear I can’t teach the simplest thing without their objections. Their resistance. Simple sentence: subject, predicate and, maybe, if we get around to it someday, the object, direct and indirect. I don’t know what to do with them. Try the old threats. Pay attention or you’re going to fail. If you fail you won’t graduate and if you don’t graduate blah blah blah. All your friends will be out there in the big wide world pinning their high school diplomas to their office walls, successful, respected by one and all. Why can’t you just look at this sentence and, for once in your miserable teenage existence, make an attempt to learn.”

This quotation illustrates McCourt’s humorous writing style and his frustration with his teaching role early in his career. It’s juxtaposed by the reality that he never said such things openly or acted like this, making it all the funnier. Instead, he was tepid and indecisive for many years, hardly the taskmaster depicted here. It also shows his honesty—in spite of his good intentions, he did not always know how to maintain patience or sympathy for his students, especially when they proved resistant to learning the way he wished them to.

“Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how they resist any kind of writing assignment in class or at home. They whine and say they’re busy and it’s hard putting two hundred words together on any subject. But when they forge these excuse notes they’re brilliant. Why? I have a drawer full of excuse notes that could be turned into an anthology of Great American Excuses or Great American Lies.

The drawer was filled with samples of American talent never mentioned in song, story or scholarly study. How could I have ignored this treasure trove, these gems of fiction, fantasy, creativity, crawthumping, self-pity, family problems, boilers exploding, ceilings collapsing, fires sweeping whole blocks, babies and pets pissing on homework, unexpected births, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages, robberies? Here was American high school writing at its best — raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying:

The stove caught fire and the wallpaper went up and the fire department kept us out of the house all night.”

This passage explains how McCourt happened upon one of his successful lessons early in his career. He writes that forged excuse notes from students were always more detailed and imaginative than those actually written by parents. He thus hatches a plan to have them all write excuse notes in class, which will prove to be popular with the students. This is often how McCourt designs his best lessons—when casting about for something unconventional that will get the students’ attention.

“There is a cold hostile silence in the room that says, We know you called Augie’s father. We don’t like teachers who call people’s fathers.

No use saying, Oh, look. I didn’t ask Augie’s father to do that. I just spoke to his mother and thought they’d talk to him and tell him behave in class. It’s too late. I’ve gone behind their backs, shown I can’t handle the situation myself. There’s no respect for teachers who send you to the office or call parents. If you can’t handle it yourself you shouldn’t even be a teacher. You should get a job sweeping the streets or picking up the garbage.”

Here McCourt captures the way he learned from experience, one of the book’s themes. Augie is a student who disrupts class enough that McCourt calls his mother to talk to her about it. The next day, however, Augie’s father shows up and threatens him, scaring everyone—including McCourt, who didn’t want Augie to be beaten up. In this passage, McCourt reveals the tender balance between authority and trust that he needs to navigate in his dealings with his students, recognizing that a lack of confidence between them can disrupt the relationship completely.

“I tried to imitate Seiden’s elegant style with my classes of plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, but they looked at me as if I had lost my wits.

Professors could get up there and lecture to their hearts’ content with never a fear of contradiction or a quibble. That was a life to be envied. They never had to tell anyone sit down, open your notebook, no, you may not have the pass. They never had to break up fights. Assignments were to be completed on time. No excuses, sir or madam, this is not high school. If you find it difficult to keep up with the work you ought to drop the course. Excuses are for children.”

Morton Irving Seiden was McCourt’s favorite professor at Brooklyn College when he was working on his master’s degree. In this passage, he compares their jobs and envisions Seiden’s to be far superior. Professors can focus on the subject matter; all else is irrelevant. McCourt’s tendency to idealize what other groups may have, and his longing for a more uncomplicated life of intellectualism and writing—the writing life—appears here, just as the same tendency will assert itself at other times in the memoir.

“There are ten minutes left in the hour and I tell the class they should feel free now to explore the library. No one moves. They don’t even whisper anymore. They sit in their winter overcoats. They clutch book bags and wait till that exact second when the hour ends.

In the hallway I tell my friend, veteran professor Herbert Miller, of my problems with this class. He says, They work days and nights. They come to class. They sit and listen. They do their best. These people in the admissions office let them in, then expect the teacher to perform a miracle or be the hatchet man. I’m not going to be the enforcer for the front office. Research? How can these people do research papers when they still struggle to read the damn newspaper?”

This is about McCourt’s class at the community college, where he taught for a year in the 1960s. His students mostly worked full time and took classes at night; many were immigrants whose first language was not English. It illustrates how he struggles to spark their interest in academic matters and ideas. His fellow professor succinctly sums up their dilemma in the second paragraph: their job as teachers really asks the impossible. It’s not the fault of the students. Rather, it’s just how the system is set up. The situation embodies the gap between idealism and reality that often exists in McCourt’s experiences as a teacher.

“A few years earlier I could have been one of them, part of the huddled masses. This is my immigrant comfort level. I know English, but I’m not so far removed from their confusions. Rock bottom in the social hierarchy.”

With this quotation, McCourt notes the similarity between himself and his students while teaching English as a Second Language. It refers to his classes at Seward Park High School, which had a particularly diverse student body. He sees in their confusion and frustrations a reflection of his own experiences as a new immigrant to America. This connection gives him an advantage as a teacher. He even tells them he was confused when he first came to America, which they’re surprised to hear from a teacher. Seeking to see himself as more of an equal than an authority figure for his students becomes one of the hallmarks of McCourt’s teaching approach.

“Then Maria raised her hand. Mr. McCourt, I got a letter from Serena. She said this the first letter of her life and she wouldn’ta wrote it but her grandma told her. She never met her grandma before but she loves her because she can’t read or write and Serena reads the Bible to her every night. She said, this gonna kill you, Mr. McCourt, she said she gonna finish high school and go to college and teach little kids. Not big kids like us because we just a great pain but little kids that don’t talk back and she say she sorry about things she did in this class and to tell you that. Someday she gonna write you a letter.

There were fireworks in my head. It was New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July a hundred times over.”

This quotation comes at the end of McCourt’s account of his class at Seward Park High School, which was composed almost entirely of girls who gave him a lot of trouble. Serena was their leader and often difficult for McCourt to deal with effectively. In this passage, hearing about Serena’s new ambitions and regret for her own bad behavior serves as both a victory and as a vindication for McCourt, who realizes that he does indeed sometimes have a real, positive impact upon the lives of his students.

“And what is this sudden warmth I feel for this lumbering future plumber from Delancey Street, Manhattan? Is it the patient way he waits, almost gentle in his look? He seems so reasonable and thoughtful. So, why don’t I drop my tough teacher act and tell him, Oh, all right. Sit down, Brandt. Forget the pass now and try to remember it next time. But I’ve pushed too far to turn back. His classmates are witnesses and something has to happen.”

This is an example of two things that sometimes happened in the classroom to McCourt. It comes from the anecdote about Benny Brandt, who came to class one day without a pass for his absences for the previous four days. First, it reveals McCourt’s perpetual struggle in wishing to be more authoritative in the classroom, but also his hesitations regarding how to do so without alienating his students. Second, McCourt is unable to change course even when he senses that he is losing control of the situation—a sign of his continuing insecurity as a teacher.

“Anytime I visited Dublin after that I was drawn to Trinity. I stood by the gate admiring the elegant way the students tossed their flapping Trinity scarves over their shoulders. I admired the accents that sounded English. I coveted the beautiful Protestant girls who would never cast me a glance. They would marry their own kind, their own class of people, all Protestants with horses, and if the likes of me ever married one of them he’d be booted out of the Catholic Church with no hope of redemption.”

Here McCourt describes Trinity College in Dublin and how he viewed it. McCourt describes himself as an outsider, by both class and religion, feeding into his characteristic insecurity and self-doubt. These insecurities will surface again when he attempts to pursue his doctorate there, suggesting that overcoming social hierarchies in Ireland is just as difficult—if not even more difficult—for McCourt there than it is in the United States.

“I stood at that rail, with the ship whooshing along, thinking about my life and what a poltroon I was. (That was one of my favorite words at the time and it was apt.) Poltroon. All I did from the day I arrived in New York to this day on the Queen Elizabeth was meander from one thing to another: emigrate, work at dead-end jobs, drink in Germany and New York, chase women, sleep through four years at New York University, drift from one teaching job to another, marry and wish I was single, have another drink, hit a cul-de-sac in teaching, sail for Ireland with the hope that life would behave itself.”

This passage comes from the chapter about McCourt’s doctoral studies at Trinity College in Dublin. He’s in his late 30s and still adrift. The passage reflects McCourt’s preoccupation with his lack of focus and ambition, and highlights his passivity: He hopes that “life would behave itself” upon his return to Ireland, instead of behaving proactively and embracing his own agency. This passage sets up the contrast between the younger, passive McCourt and the wiser, confident, and more settled man he will become by the book’s end.

The bag sat on the floor in a corner by the kitchen, never far from sight or mind, an animal, a dog waiting for attention. Its eyes followed me. I didn’t want to hide it in a closet for fear I might forget completely there were papers to read and correct.

There was no point in trying to read them before dinner. I’d wait till later, help with the dishes, put my daughter to bed, get down to work. Get that bag, man. Sit on the couch where you can spread things out, put some music on the phonograph or turn on the radio. Nothing distracting. Some acoustic syrup. Music to grade papers by. Settle yourself on the couch.”

In this passage, McCourt depicts the home life of a teacher, especially a writing teacher. Papers add to the workload, and must be done outside of regular school hours. He describes the feeling at home after school, the essays always hanging over his head and making for a late night. His reluctance to engage with the task immediately after work also suggests a streak of procrastination, with McCourt sometimes struggling to find the motivation to mark and instead delaying it until he can create more ideal circumstances for his marking.

“After fifteen years in four different high schools—McKee, Fashion Industries, Seward Park, Stuyvesant—and the college in Brooklyn, I’m developing the instincts of a dog. When new classes come in September and February I can sniff their chemical composition. I watch the way they look and they watch the way I look. I can pick out types: the eager, willing ones; the cool; the show-me; the indifferent; the hostile; the opportunists here because they’ve heard I’m an easy marker; the lovers here simply to be near the beloved.”

In this passage, McCourt appears as much more experienced and comfortable in the classroom after a decade and a half, compared to when he first started out. The tone of this passage is notably different from that of other, earlier passages, as when he described his first classes at McKee. His self-assurance and wisdom have come from experience, from doing and observing, which ties into one of the book’s themes.

“Broadway audiences meet actors halfway with politeness and applause. They’ve paid high prices for their tickets. They cluster at stage doors and ask for autographs. Public high school teachers perform five times a day. Their audiences disappear when bells ring and they’re asked for autographs only on yearbooks at graduation.

You can fool some of the kids some of the time, but they know when you’re wearing the mask, and you know they know. They force you into truth. If you contradict yourself they’ll call out, Hey, that’s not what you said last week. You face years of experience and their collective truth, and if you insist on hiding behind the teacher mask you lose them. Even if they lie to themselves and the world they look for honesty in the teacher.”

In this passage, McCourt contrasts the status and reception of high-profile Broadway stars with the kind of performing teachers need to do every single day. While both groups have to face an audience and deliver a kind of performance, both the nature of that performance and the reception of it are different: The stars are adored, well-paid, and praised for bringing fictional worlds to life, while teachers play a more anonymous and underappreciated role in society. Furthermore, while the stars thrive in a world of fiction, McCourt argues that teachers need to be honest and authentic in order to win over the trust and respect of their students.

“Take a few minutes to look over the poem again. Let it sink in. So, when you read the poem, what happened?

What do you mean, What happened?

You read the poem. Something happened, something moved in your head, in your body, in your lunch box. Or nothing happened. You’re not required to respond to every stimulus in the universe. You’re not weather vanes.

Mr. McCourt, what are you talking about?

I’m saying you don’t have to respond to everything a teacher or anyone else sets before you.

They look dubious. Oh, yeah. Tell that to some of the teachers around here. They take everything personally.

Mr. McCourt, do you want us to talk about what the poem means?

I’d like you to talk about whatever you’d like to talk about in the general neighborhood of this poem. Bring in your grandmother if you like. Don’t worry about the ‘real’ meaning of the poem. Even the poet won’t know that. When you read it something happened, or nothing happened.”

This is an excerpt of McCourt’s lesson on the Theodore Roethke poem “My Papa’s Waltz.” It’s an example of his unstructured, open-ended teaching style. He’s not asking for “The Answer” or even an analysis, but rather a reaction. Even then he tells his students they don’t have to react to everything, allowing them a space to give a genuine answer instead of trying to anticipate what he wishes to hear.

“I won’t take up your time, but I told him, Over my dead body. We agreed from day one he’d be an accountant. Never any doubt about that. I mean what am I working for? I’m a CPA myself and if you have any little problems I’d be glad to help out. No, sir. No classical guitar. I tell him, Go get your accountancy degree and play your guitar in your spare time. He breaks down. He cries. He threatens to live with his mother and I wouldn’t wish that on a Nazi. So, I wonder if you could have a word with him? I know he likes your class, likes playing recipes and whatever you’re doing here.”

This passage is how McCourt describes part of a meeting with a father on Open School Day. The man’s son, McCourt’s student, wants to study classical guitar in college, while the father insists on accounting. The boy’s parents are divorced, adding to the tension, and McCourt is put in the middle. McCourt replies that he is not a guidance counselor, just the boy’s English teacher. It’s an example of one of the many roles teachers are asked to play—coach, counselor, psychologist, and so on. It’s also an example of how McCourt handles serious topics with humor.

“Mr. McCourt, you’re lucky. You had that miserable childhood so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the two point three kids you’re always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like fifty percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.

Jonathan, that is the most miserable scenario of American life I’ve heard in a high school classroom. But you’ve supplied the ingredients for the great American novel. You’ve encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

This passage touches on the writing life, one of the book’s key themes. McCourt’s early life, which he’s told his students about, makes for interesting and entertaining stories. By comparison, the students feel their own lives are uneventful and boring, therefore yielding no material for writing. He assures them in his reply that such “uneventful” lives have been used to great effect by famous writers. They simply need to be observant and find a clever way to tell their own stories. McCourt’s declaration represents his own personal growth in determining that it is experience, and not belonging to a particular place or group, that provides material for the true writing life.

“I’ll tell you how I arrive at a grade. First, how was your attendance? Even if you sat quietly in the back and thought about the discussions and the readings, you surely learned something. Second, did you participate? Did you get up there and read on Fridays? Anything. Stories, essays, poetry, plays. Third, did you comment on the work of your classmates? Fourth, and this is up to you, can you reflect on this experience and ask yourself what you learned? Fifth, did you just sit there and dream? If you did, give yourself credit.

This is where teacher turns serious and asks the Big Question: What is education, anyway? What are we doing in this school? You can say you’re trying to graduate so that you can go to college and prepare for a career. But, fellow students, it’s more than that. I’ve had to ask myself what the hell I’m doing in the classroom. I’ve worked out an equation for myself. On the left side of the blackboard I print a capital F, on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM.”

This quotation comes near the end of the book, which coincides with the end of McCourt’s teaching career. It’s his reply to students who ask him how he determines their grades, and reflects McCourt’s maturation as a teacher and his ultimate theory as to what the purpose of education is. In describing his unconventional and somewhat loose way of evaluating the students, McCourt once again emphasizes his unconventional and less rigid approach to pedagogy. In declaring that the purpose of education is to lead a person from fear to freedom, McCourt reveals his own personal growth as well as his educational philosophy: Throughout the book, the trend in McCourt’s life has been to slowly open up from the fear and insecurity that have hampered him. Only over time has he felt more free, and through his teaching, he’s trying to do the same for his students.