Teacher Man

The first chapter tells the story of McCourt’s first two days as a teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, on Staten Island, in 1958. He is 28 years old, making a rocky, unsteady foray into a classroom full of savvy teenagers. They are juniors, he writes, and after about a decade of experience with teachers, they are masters at analyzing and manipulating whoever stands at the head of the classroom.

McCourt is inexperienced and has no clue about how to handle teens. University programs in education taught him theory, not classroom management. So when one boy throws his baloney sandwich at another boy, McCourt does not know how to react. It is still only the first lesson, and he has no established relationship with the students yet. He tells them to stop throwing sandwiches. When someone points out it is too late—the sandwich has already been thrown—the other students erupt in laughter and McCourt feels foolish.

Picking the sandwich up off the floor, he mentally runs through his options. He wishes to show them he is tough and in charge, so he opens the bag and eats the sandwich. This gets their attention—as well as the attention of the principal who happens to be walking by and sees McCourt eating. The principal calls him out into the hall and, thinking McCourt was eating his own lunch in class at 9 AM, reprimands him for breaking the no-food rule in classrooms and for setting a bad example for his students.

The next day, a talkative student named Joey tries to sidetrack McCourt from his planned spelling lesson by asking him questions about Ireland, where McCourt lived as a child. One question is whether McCourt had gone out with girls in Ireland, and McCourt jokingly answers that in Ireland, people date sheep instead of people. The kids all laugh, but some apparently tell their parents that night, as McCourt gets called to the principal’s office the next morning. Again he gets scolded and now has two strikes against him. Because McCourt is new and inexperienced, the principal says he won’t put a letter of reprimand in his file, since that would hinder McCourt’s chances of moving into an administrative position later in his career. McCourt replies that he has no plans for that and just wants to teach.

In this chapter, McCourt relates his childhood growing up in Ireland. He prefaces the story by stating that this was a frequent part of his teaching throughout his career, because students would ask him questions about his past during class and he often obliged them by answering. As a young teacher, McCourt is originally of two minds about this, since he feels guilty that it takes class time away from the lessons he’s supposed to teach. On the other hand, he notes that storytelling is a form of teaching and it keeps the students’ attention. Besides, he writes, “It’s a routine that softens them up in the unlikely event I might teach something solid from the curriculum” (26).

As a child in Limerick, he was made fun of by his classmates for the way he spoke Irish with an American accent (having been born in New York City). They mocked and pushed him until a fight started and he got punched in the nose, bloodying the only shirt he had. At home, his mother scolded him for fighting and washed his shirt. Not long after, he fought again to defend his father, whose Northern accent the boys also mocked, accusing him of being a Protestant. With each bloody nose from fighting, the shirt started to become a light shade of red—almost pink—that did not come out in the wash. For this he got mocked as well, until a boy named Billy Campbell stuck up for him and sent the bullies away. McCourt admired Billy’s courage, something he didn’t have himself.

He tells the students another tale of his schoolmaster preparing the class for their First Communion and First Confession. All the boys, the teacher claimed, were bad, having been born into Original Sin. Baptism was supposed to cleanse them, but it obviously hadn’t worked, he said. He instructed the boys to bow their heads and say, “Mea culpa,” Latin for “I am guilty.” McCourt says that even as he grew up and the church had less influence over him, he always retained a sense of guilt learned from this time.

The students at McKee also ask him about coming back to America, the land of his birth, when he was 19. He tells them about shopping for the trip at a pawnshop, and how his mother ruthlessly bargained for his clothes because, he thinks, she felt this was his big opportunity. She wanted him to wear a suit and look good upon arrival. She drove a hard bargain again at the secondhand shop where they got his suitcase. Then she took the items home while he went off to buy the book he wanted to bring to America. It was the complete works of William Shakespeare—not because he was such a fan of Shakespeare’s work, but rather because he once saw a film of an American soldier who won the affection of girls by quoting Shakespeare.

With that, McCourt tries to wrap up his stories to return to the day’s lesson, but the students want more. They ask if he was in the army and whether he fought in Korea. He’s amazed that they find his life so interesting.

Chapter 3 continues the setup of McCourt answering his students’ questions in class as a way of explaining how he became a teacher. He used the GI Bill after a stint in the army to attend New York University. He tells the class about an education class, taught by a professor named Norm, who warned the students to be on guard when they begin teaching. They must create an “identity and image” (40) and project strength because teenagers know how to read their teachers and find weaknesses.

Two of McCourt’s classmates were skeptical, guessing that Norm had never actually taught school himself. A girl named June Somers stood up and asked the professor directly whether he’d ever taught school. He replied that he’d observed many classes and supervised countless student teachers. She repeated her question. Annoyed, Norm said she was wasting class time and could make an appointment if she wanted to discuss it further. With that, she stood up and left the classroom.

At the next week’s class, a classmate named Seymour told McCourt he had seen June and the professor together at a coffee shop, holding hands and behaving in a romantic manner. McCourt had a crush on June and had hoped that they might go to the movies sometime, but realized it was unlikely a beautiful girl like her would be interested in someone like him. He went to the coffee shop Seymour mentioned, fantasizing that he’d see June with Norm and she’d slip him her phone number on the way to the restroom. To his surprise, that’s exactly what happened.

They met at a bar for a drink, where June was open and direct while McCourt was uneasy and lacking confidence. She told him that Norm was away in Vermont, where he taught a class a couple of days each week. Leaving the bar, they walked to her apartment, where she cooked dinner and they made love. They met every night for the next week, and McCourt was happy with the affair, but for one thing. Norm sent June a dozen roses, which she kept in a vase in full view. He wondered how she could be with both of them at the same time. Even when McCourt bought her flowers of his own, June just put them with Norm’s, making McCourt jealous.

Toward the end of the semester, McCourt ran into Seymour, who asked about June. Surprised, McCourt didn’t know what to say. Seymour said she had also pursued him, but they were only together for two weeks before he left. “I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell,” he says (47). Norm didn’t teach in Vermont, he informed McCourt, and knew all about their affair. June told him everything. McCourt walked away angry.

McCourt then recalls the final tests he took to become a teacher. He was questioned before a panel of experts, who gave him a poem to analyze and explain how he would teach it in class. McCourt struggled openly with the task, misidentifying the author and being unsure of the form or rhyme scheme. He thought the poem alluded to death by suicide and said that in his lesson he would have students write a suicide note of their own. Horrified, the panel dismissed him. He then went and got drunk, waking up hung over the next morning when he had to teach a lesson to a high school class while being evaluated by the department chair.

McCourt arrived late and got his lesson topic: World War I poems. He knew some by heart and got off to a promising start. However, he lost control as the students went off on tangents and he was unable to regain authority in the classroom. Certain that he had failed, he left in a hurry afterward, only to hear the chair calling his name behind him. The man told him he did well, as at least he knew the poems, which many candidates did not. He told McCourt to call him for a job when he graduated. McCourt was delighted, thinking about what people back in Ireland would say about him rising from humble beginnings to become a teacher. When his teacher’s license arrived in the mail, he called the department chair as promised, only to learn that the man had died. Furthermore, he was told there were no open positions.

Sometimes McCourt’s students ask him if he ever had a so-called “real” job. He tells them that teaching is real work—a lot harder than the work he did on the docks unloading trucks. After he got his teaching license, he doubted he could make it as a teacher and got a job on the piers around New York. The job had its own challenges, mainly all the different personalities of the various people who came and went there. Some made fun of him by mimicking his Irish accent, while others provoked fights.

A man named Eddie Lynch was the boss, and he took McCourt under his wing, giving him advice about how to navigate the dynamics of the place. McCourt wanted to just keep to himself and work, but other employees felt a need to break up the monotony. Eddie explained that many of the middle-aged men were World War II veterans who felt like they had a purpose during the war, and who now resented working an apparently lowly and less meaningful job. When fights broke out between the men, Eddie stepped in before they got out of hand.

Once McCourt had a fight with a truck driver they called Fat Dominic, who had insulted his mother. Dominic knocked McCourt off the loading platform a few times before Eddie dragged McCourt away, telling him to take the rest of the day off. He’d smooth things over by giving half of McCourt’s daily pay to Fat Dominic. Later the two men reconciled and worked together without any further conflict.

McCourt writes that “Eddie was the kind of man you’d like to have for a father” (63). The boss told him how things worked, on the job and in life—things he didn’t learn in college. Eddie had no family of his own because he took care of his father, who had “shellshock”—now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—from the First World War. One day, while Eddie was working with Fat Dominic, he had a coughing fit he couldn’t control and collapsed. He was dead by the time the ambulance came. McCourt briefly considered applying for his job in the office, but a woman there convinced him there was no future in it and that he should become a teacher after all.