50 pages • 1 hour read
Frank McCourtTeacher Man
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary
This first chapter of Part 3 explains how McCourt’s itinerant teaching career finally comes together and he finds a bit more stability. A year after returning from Dublin, he gets a job at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, a college preparatory school. He first fills in for someone on leave and then takes a full-time position. He plans to stay only two years and then quit teaching, but that changes after the birth of his daughter Maggie. His domestic duties bring some order to his life, and he settles into a routine, feeling more content with his circumstances.
Roger Goodman, the assistant principal and head of the English Department at Stuyvesant, is different from the other administrators McCourt had previously met: trusting, supportive, and without arrogance. They drink together and Roger thinks McCourt is a great teacher, asking what McCourt wants to teach and letting him browse the department’s vast supply of English books. Although McCourt feels more confident in his career, teaching is still a challenge in many ways. He explains how time-consuming the work is, giving as an example what it’s like to grade five classes’ worth of papers: “If you gave each paper a bare five minutes you’d spend, on this one set of papers, fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes. That would amount to more than two teaching days, and the end of the weekend” (187).
In 1974, Goodman asks McCourt to take over the creative writing classes. He announces to one class that they will read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, speaking about the inequities between rich and poor in society. The students complain that they would rather read science fiction. Though they complain and joke about McCourt’s righteous indignation, some students show more understanding. A boy named Ben Chan stays after class one day to tell McCourt he personally understands poverty. He came to America from China, where his family endured many hardships. Another day, a girl named Sylvia stays late to tell McCourt about her experience living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It’s poor and no one from there goes to college, she says, but she has ambitions to become a doctor, so she, too, knows what he’s saying about the ills of poverty.
In 1979, a year before McCourt turns 50, he and Alberta get divorced. He stays with various friends until he finds an apartment over a bar in Brooklyn, where neon lights come through the windows and music blares up from below.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
The creative writing class McCourt teaches is not mandatory, but it is popular with the students. He wonders why, afraid that he’s gotten a reputation as an easy grader or as generally undemanding. He compares himself unfavorably to other instructors. Still, he is finding his own teaching style at Stuyvesant, after years of teaching at schools where wasting time on classroom management and busywork were the norm.
One day in class, food comes up as a topic. One student offers to bring in some homemade marzipan, and soon they are planning an entire potluck. The next day, the class meets outside in the park, with food spread out on the benches. After their feast, McCourt asks them to bring cookbooks to class the next day. When asked why, he says he isn’t sure, but that he might have an idea.
The cookbook lesson is one on reading aloud. Recipes are like poems, he tells them. One boy objects, complaining that this is not an English class—they should read American literature, as classes with other teachers do. Other students defend McCourt, with one girl saying that the recipes are “even better than poetry because you can taste them. And, wow, the Italian recipes are pure music” (208). Another student offers to play his flute as background music, which adds to the festive atmosphere. They plan more musical accompaniment for the next day, with the boy who objected even giving in and offering to bring his oboe. On the way home that day, McCourt begins to doubt himself, wondering if his lesson was just a waste of time. He imagines what administrators and visiting educators would think if they observed it. On the other hand, the students were fully engaged.
The next day is another raucous lesson of food and music. McCourt tries to make connections to writing and more serious topics, with little success. He imagines other teachers preparing their students for top universities, contrasting himself with their discipline and professionalism:
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. (213)
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary
In Chapter 14 McCourt uses vignettes from the classroom that show him coming into his own as a teacher, and always learning from his students. After the recipe lesson, he decides it’s time to be more conventional in his approach, and the class begins examining poetry. He starts with “Little Bo Peep,” the nursery rhyme for children. The students are perplexed by his choice, saying it’s too easy for high school. Look closer, he tells them, and search for a deeper message. He offers as an example the third line, which is “Leave them alone and they will come home” (216). McCourt suggests it means that people should stop bothering other people.
Another time they discuss the violence of the Grimm’s fairy tales. Then they sing songs from McCourt’s childhood, which are Mother Goose rhymes put to music. McCourt likes how students from all different backgrounds and ethnicities join together in the activity. Then he envisions a letter of admonishment from an administrator, had he or she observed the class, and vows to come up with something more serious.
As a result, they discuss the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke. The discussion is wide-ranging, with McCourt only asking that they respond to it, not necessarily look for a deeper meaning in it. The students are used to being asked to analyze poems, but he discourages that. “I asked you only what happened when you read the poem. If nothing happened it’s not a crime,” he tells them (223). He explains that some things inspire interest in a reader while other works might not inspire any particular reactions.
Whenever the students’ attention wanders or they need a diversion, McCourt asks to describe their dinner the previous night, as an exercise in noting details. A boy named Daniel starts his answers by describing a meal in which he dines alone in luxury at his apartment—seated at a mahogany table under a chandelier, listening to classical music. When asked why he was alone, he says his parents were in the hospital, where his father is dying of cancer. McCourt apologizes, saying Daniel should have said something at the start and he wouldn’t have asked him to participate. Daniel replies that it doesn’t matter, his father would die either way. The class is silent, and McCourt feels as if they’re all at the father’s bedside, keeping vigil with Daniel’s mother.
The chapter ends on one more lesson McCourt describes: The class reads restaurant reviews by the New York Times critic Mimi Sheraton before writing reviews of their own. They review local pizza joints and the school cafeteria. When they write dismissively of the cafeteria, he urges them to be more specific and ambitious in their writing.
Part 3, Chapters 12-14 Analysis
Fittingly, the title of Part 3 includes the words “Coming Alive,” something McCourt finally does as he settles into his job at Stuyvesant High School. The theme of learning from experience comes to fruition in this section, as more than a decade’s worth of teaching experience finally pays off. By this point in his career, McCourt is becoming more confident. Stuyvesant, as a school focused on students destined for college instead of a trade, appears to be a better fit for McCourt. The combination of these factors results in McCourt feeling more mature as a teacher.
Nevertheless, McCourt still has moments of self-doubt. He compares himself unfavorably to other teachers, and he always seems to be wondering what the school authorities might say of his classes. He even envisions an entire letter from an imaginary superintendent, writing an evaluation of his class in which they sang Mother Goose rhymes. Perhaps it’s intentional that he uses the term mea culpa in Chapter 13, in order to hark back to his Catholic upbringing described in the early chapters and the guilt the priests instilled by emphasizing the sinfulness of all the boys.
There is also a marked thematic focus on the purpose of education. In these chapters, McCourt describes successful lessons full of engaged students, even though the lessons are unconventional, as when he uses recipes or the dinner descriptions in class. Sometimes the lessons have unexpected, but valuable, results. For example, the dinner description lesson leads to an awkward silence when Daniel reveals that his father is dying, but the awkwardness passes into a sense of shared empathy. McCourt feels as if they’re all keeping vigil for Daniel’s father, and in a sense they are, by hearing and momentarily sharing Daniel’s experience. In this way, the students learn a more general lesson about empathy instead of something more narrowly academic.
