Product Description

This is the third memoir from the author of the huge international bestsellers "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis". In "Teacher Man", Frank McCourt details his illustrious, amusing, and sometimes rather bumpy long years as an English teacher in the public high schools of New York City! Frank McCourt arrived in New York as a young, impoverished and idealistic Irish boy - but one who crucially had an American passport, having been born in Brooklyn. He didn't know what he wanted except to stop being hungry and to better himself. On the subway, he watched students carrying books. He saw how they read and underlined and wrote things in the margin and he liked the look of this very much. He joined the New York Public Library and every night when he came back from his hotel work, he would sit up reading the great novels. Building his confidence and his determination, he talked his way into NYU and gained a literature degree and so began a teaching career that was to last 30 years, working in New York's public high schools. Frank estimates that he probably taught 12,000 children during this time and it is on this relationship between teacher and student that he reflects in "Teacher Man", the third in his series of memoirs. The New York high school is a restless, noisy and unpredictable place and Frank believes that it was his attempts to control and cajole these thousands of children into learning and achieving something for themselves that turned him into a writer. At least once a day someone would put up their hand and shout 'Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, tell us about Ireland, tell us about how poor you were!' Through sharing his own life with these kids, he learnt the power of narrative storytelling, and out of the invaluable experience of holding 12,000 people's attention came "Angela's Ashes". Frank McCourt was a legend in such schools as Stuyvesant High School - long before he became the figure he is now he would receive letters from former students telling him how much his teaching influenced and inspired them - and now in "Teacher Man" he shares his reminiscences of those 30 years and reveals how they led to his own success with "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15451 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-28
• Released on: 2006-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'McCourt has a compulsion to tell us the story of his life, but he does it so well -- modulating beautifully from ventriloquistically exact repro teen-speak to rhapsodic meditations on his midlife crisis -- that one couldn't possibly want him to stop. I wish I could have been in one of his classes.' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times 'This memoir about teaching is unlike any other I have read: relatively mundane events and incidents shine against that backdrop of that pathetic, abused child.' Francis Gilbert, Sunday Telegraph 'Damn entertaining!McCourt is a master racouteur.' Washington Post '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.' Publishers Weekly 'As good as writing gets about teaching and learning and finding yourself through writing.' USA Today 'Heart-warming.' New York Times 'McCourt has an undeniable gift for turning a phrase.' Boston Globe

Observer
'...it is exhilarating to see these generations of tough-talking
teenagers blossom.'

Daily Telegraph
'McCourt's gift for mellifluous storytelling means that his tales
of jubilation and disillusionment never disappoint.'

Customer Reviews

Almost As Good As "Angela's Ashes"
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: Reposted from Amazon's USA website)

Every young teacher should read this book...
Every young teacher should read this book... and be reassured by the fact that every new tacher is doomed to go through certain experiences, no matter when or where! Funny, entertaining, but also deeply moving. McCourt describes his teaching world in a powerful way, transmitting his mixed feelings about a job that, despite everything, gave him a reason of life.

Who would be a teacher?
Anyone who wants to be a school teacher, is a school teacher, was a school teacher, is at school or went to school should read this book.

The pitched psycological battles between student and teacher will be familiar to all. Told with candour and wit, McCourt is a natural writer and has us laughing next to him.

This is just the sort of man I want to sit next to in a bar - funny, intelligent and often self deprecating he has an innocence about him whilst also carrying his impoverished childhood as a feat of survival (see 'Angela's Ashes' and 'Tis').

If you've not read them you'll also want to pick up 'Tis' and 'Angela's Ashes', McCourt's first two books.