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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For 30 years Frank McCourt taught high school English in New York City and for much of that time he considered himself a fraud. During these years he danced a delicate jig between engaging the students, satisfying often bewildered administrators and parents, and actually enjoying his job. He tried to present a consistent image of composure and self-confidence, yet he regularly felt insecure, inadequate, and unfocused. After much trial and error, he eventually discovered what was in front of him (or rather, behind him) all along--his own experience. "My life saved my life," he writes. "My students didn't know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere." At the beginning of his career it had never occurred to him that his own dismal upbringing in the slums of Limerick could be turned into a valuable lesson plan. Indeed, his formal training emphasized the opposite. Principals and department heads lectured him to never share anything personal. He was instructed to arouse fear and awe, to be stern, to be impossible to please--but he couldn't do it. McCourt was too likable, too interested in the students' lives, and too willing to reveal himself for their benefit as well as his own. He was a kindred spirit with more questions than answers: "Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens."

As he did so adroitly in his previous memoirs, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt manages to uncover humor in nearly everything. He writes about hilarious misfires, as when he suggested (during his teacher's exam) that the students write a suicide note, as well as unorthodox assignments that turned into epiphanies for both teacher and students. A dazzling writer with a unique and compelling voice, McCourt describes the dignity and difficulties of a largely thankless profession with incisive, self-deprecating wit and uncommon perception. It may have taken him three decades to figure out how to be an effective teacher, but he ultimately saved his most valuable lesson for himself: how to be his own man. --Shawn Carkonen



From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela's Ashes and continued in 'Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt's 30-year teaching career in New York City's public high schools, which began at McKee Vocational and Technical in 1958. His first day in class, a fight broke out and a sandwich was hurled in anger. McCourt immediately picked it up and ate it. On the second day of class, McCourt's retort about the Irish and their sheep brought the wrath of the principal down on him. All McCourt wanted to do was teach, which wasn't easy in the jumbled bureaucracy of the New York City school system. Pretty soon he realized the system wasn't run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. "I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study." As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write "excuse notes" from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It's about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt's many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn't hurt some politicians to read it, too. (Nov. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (November 15, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0743243773
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743243773
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (260 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,628 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Frank McCourt
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New York, Stuyvesant High School, Big George, Fat Dominic, Trinity College, Staten Island, Fred Astaire, Boom Boom, Puerto Ricans, Mimi Sheraton, The Nose, Sing Sing, Board of Education, Stuyvesant Square, Phil Fisher, Professor Walton, English Department, Gas House, Grafton Street, Ben Jonson, Old Country, Roger Goodman, Cold Turkey, Queen Elizabeth, Open School Day
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Teacher Man: A Memoir
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186 of 212 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Almost As Good As "Angela's Ashes", November 15, 2005
By John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
McCourties of the world rejoice! You have nothing to lose but your tears of woe anticipating when he'd return with his next book; the foremost memoirist of our time is back. Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man" is a spellbinding lyrical ode to the craft of teaching. It is a rollicking, delightful trek across nearly thirty years in New York City public school classrooms that will surely please his devout legion of fans, and perhaps win some new admirers too. Truly, without question, it is a splendid concluding volume in his trilogy of memoirs that began in spectacular fashion with "Angela's Ashes". Indeed, we find much of the same plain, yet rather poetic, prose and rich dark humor that defines his first book, along with his undiminished, seemingly timeless, skill as a mesmerizing raconteur. Is McCourt truly now one of the great writers of our time if he isn't already, with the publication of "Teacher Man"? I will say only that he was a marvellous teacher (I still feel lucky to have been a prize-winning student of his.), and that this new memoir truly captures the spirit of what it was like to be a student in his classroom.

"Teacher Man" opens with a hilarious Prologue that would seem quite self-serving if written by someone other than Frank McCourt, in which he reviews his star-struck existence in the nine years since the original publication of "Angela's Ashes". In Part I (It's a Long Road to Pedagogy) he dwells on the eight years he spent at McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island. It starts, promisingly enough, with him on the verge of ending his teaching career, just as it begins in the lawless Wild West frontier of a McKee classroom (I was nearly in stitches laughing out loud, after learning why he was nearly fired on two consecutive days, no less.). Frank manages to break every rule learned in his Education courses at New York University, but he succeeds in motivating his students, raising the craft of excuse note writing to a high literary art. He finds time too to fall in love with his first wife, Alberta Small, and then earn a M. A. degree in English from Brooklyn College.

Part II (Donkey on a Thistle) has the funniest tale; an unbelievable odyssey to a Times Square movie theater with Frank as chaperone to an unruly tribe of thirty Seward Park High School girls. But before we get there, we're treated to a spellbinding account of his all too brief time as an adjunct lecturer of English at Brooklyn's New York Community College, and of another short stint at Fashion Industries High School, where he receives a surprising, and poignant, reminder from his past. Soon Frank will forsake high school teaching, sail off to Dublin, and enroll in a doctoral program at Trinity College, in pursuit of a thesis on Irish-American literature. But, that too fails, and with Alberta pregnant, he accepts an offer to become a substitute teacher at prestigious Stuyvesant High School (The nation's oldest high school devoted to the sciences and mathematics; its alumni now include four Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, medicine and economics; for more information please look at my ABOUT ME section, or at history at www.stuy.edu or famous alumni at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School or Notables at www.ourstrongband.org.).

Surprisingly, Part III (Coming Alive in Room 205) is the shortest section of "Teacher Man". After having spent fifteen years teaching at Stuyvesant High School, you'd think that this would be this memoir's longest section, replete with many tales rich in mirth (Room 205, located a few doors from the principal's office, was Frank's room throughout his years teaching full-time at Stuyvesant High School.). Indeed I'm surprised that it is so brief. Yet there is still ample fodder for Frank's lyrical prose to dwell on, most notably a hilarious episode on cookbooks and how he taught his creative writing class to write recipes for them. He describes with equal doses of hilarity and eloquence, his unique style of teaching at Stuyvesant, which he compares and contrasts with math teachers Philip Fisher and Edward Marcantonio - the dark and good sides of Stuyvesant mathematics education in the 1970s and 1980s (I was a student of both and will let the reader decide who was my teacher while I was a student in Frank's creative writing class.) - but he still implies that his students were having the most fun.

Will "Teacher Man" earn the same critical acclaim bestowed upon "Angela's Ashes"? Who knows? Is it deserving of it? I think the answer is a resounding yes. Regardless, Frank's many devout fans - his flock of McCourties - will cherish this book as yet another inspirational tale from the foremost memoirist of our time.

(EDITORIAL NOTE 7/22/09: Elsewhere online I posted this tribute to my favorite high school teacher, and I think it is worth noting here:

I've been fortunate to have had many fine teachers in high school, college and graduate school, but there was no one like Frank McCourt. Without a doubt, he was the most inspirational, most compelling, and the funniest, teacher I ever had. I am still grateful to him for instilling in me a life-long love of literature and a keen interest in writing prose. Am still amazed that he encouraged me to enter a citywide essay contest on New York City's waterfront, and would, more than a year later, in my senior yearbook acknowledge my second prize award by thanking me for winning him money (His was also, not surprisingly, the most eloquent set of comments I had inscribed in my yearbook from teachers.). He is gone now, but I am sure that for me, and for many of my fellow alumni of his Stuyvesant High School classes, he will live in our hearts and minds for the rest of our lives.)

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97 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "I was more than a teacher. And less.", November 19, 2005
In "Teacher Man," Frank McCourt sheepishly looks back on his thirty years of teaching, and admits that he wasn't always comfortable educating adolescents. He candidly states in his prologue, "How I became a teacher at all and remained one is a miracle." This memoir is a bittersweet look back at McCourt's not entirely successful career in the New York City Public High Schools, and at the often hilarious goings-on in his classrooms.

As he made clear in his Pulitzer-Prize winning "Angela's Ashes," McCourt had a miserable and impoverished childhood in Ireland. His alcoholic father walked out when Frank was ten. Three of his siblings died. Frank's schoolmasters were always quick to beat their recalcitrant charges with sticks, straps, and canes. He left school at fourteen and fled to America, where he worked as a manual laborer. McCourt was a man with horrible memories, low self-esteem, and no goals.

After he served a stint in the U. S. army, McCourt dozed through four years of New York University on the GI Bill. At the age of twenty-seven, he became a teacher after barely passing his licensing examination. When he began his first teaching job at McKee Vocational and Technical High School in Staten Island, it didn't take long for him to realize that he was in way over his head. Merely getting the kids to pay attention to him would count as a major triumph.

"Teacher Man" is a story of survival. McCourt basically threw out the standard English curriculum and played it by ear. He told stories of his wretched years in Ireland instead of diagramming sentences and discussing great works of literature. He had the students talk about their experiences and make up original stories. He instructed his pupils to bring in cookbooks and read recipes out loud, which they did, accompanied by music. Some parents complained about McCourt and he was shown the door a few times. However, he bounced back long enough to collect his pension and go on to do what he truly loved--writing.

"Teacher Man" is an offbeat, steam-of-consciousness book about a man shuffling through life, drifting into marriage and parenthood, and eventually finding himself. Frank McCourt is honest and self-deprecating, freely admitting that he was chronically disorganized and lacked self-discipline. He tells poignant and funny tales about the women he loved, his supervisors and colleagues, and most of all, his students. In his last teaching job, at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, McCourt faced bright and upwardly mobile college-bound teenagers. There, he says, "I was finding my voice and my own style of teaching." He still shunned traditional teaching methods, but the students in Stuyvesant had so much energy that they inspired him to reach higher than he ever had before; he enjoyed his greatest success in his creative writing classes. McCourt himself might admit that he should have heeded the advice he once gave to a prospective teacher: "Find what you love and do it."
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37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars From a former student of Frank McCourt, December 7, 2005
By Anonymous (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
Almost 30 years ago I was a student in Frank McCourt's creative writing class at Stuyvesant High School. He was one of the most memorable teachers I have ever had. The class had a wide range of talent and he treated both the good writers and the weak ones with the utmost respect. After he won the Pulitzer for Angela's Ashes, I thought about how it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy or a better teacher.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Teacher Man
Frank McCort's books are well-written and an insight into his life. His Teacher Man resonates with me, an English teacher in an inter-city school.
Published 2 days ago by Carol Schlotterbeck

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Angela
I tried to read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes some years ago, and could not slog my way through to the end. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Mitchell G. Shapiro

5.0 out of 5 stars Love it
i love it. i haven't finished the book yet, i can't put it down. he was a great author.
Published 1 month ago by KH

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious
I listened to the audio version read by the author. It is totally hilarious, in addition to moving and touching. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Brian D. Hackert

5.0 out of 5 stars It it was used, I wouldnt know it!
Arrived on time, well packaged, no indication that it was previously read or even opened for that matter!! Excellent condition!
Published 1 month ago by Chrisabel

5.0 out of 5 stars Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Would recommend this book to anyone who is a teacher, and most of us are, whether in the classroom or not. Mr. Read more
Published 1 month ago by O. Powell

2.0 out of 5 stars Struggled to finish
He may be a good writer, but after reading this not only do I think he was a bad teacher, but a jerk too. Skip this one.
Published 2 months ago by Bitta

5.0 out of 5 stars Book
Book arrived in stated condition. Shipping from MD to PA took a little over a week, but I assume it was mailed using "book rate", hence the reason for it taking a little longer... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Robert W. Whipple

5.0 out of 5 stars Excuses, Excuses: An Excerpt from Teacher Man
Excuses, Excuses: An Excerpt from Teacher Man
My students forged the notes. I turned them into a lesson plan. Read more
Published 2 months ago by D. Benor

5.0 out of 5 stars Humble and Humorous
After the enormous success of "Angela's Ashes", it would be difficlut to imagine another Frank McCourt memoir that was as touching as the Pulitzer prize-winning work. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Irishgal

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