Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man"

I finally got a chance to read a couple books that I’ve been meaning to get to. The first one was Frank McCourt’s “Teacher Man” and the other one was Jim Walsh’s story on The Replacements, “All Over but the Shouting.”

McCourt, who came to America as a teen-ager from Ireland, taught in New York public high schools for three decades. During the time he was dismissed from a couple positions and ran into pretty much the same issues that every other high school teacher has run into. There wasn’t as much sex, drugs and alcohol as I remember my students talking about, but maybe he just left those things out as a matter of taste.

Although the book was published several years back, my reading list is quite dated. Both my sister and wife had both read the book and while my wife didn’t like it, my sister said that I should read it. My sister taught in public schools in Milwaukee for several years as a speech pathologist. She’s since left schools to a stay-at-home mom. My wife felt the book was too negative and that he didn’t even seem to enjoy being a teacher.

There was a larger point that McCourt was making, however, and I didn’t take it as being an overly negative image of education in general. Any person who has spent time in a classroom has felt his frustration with the students’ unwillingness to learn for learning sake – cripes they’re teen-agers after all, a bunch of rock-head phy-ed teachers for administrators, negligent parents, or helicopter parents who NEED to have smoke blown up their asses regarding their children’s academic abilities. It’s enough to drive you to drinking. And, of course, it has. Still, there is a sweet undercurrent to McCourt’s path as a teacher. Eventually he developed his teaching voice and recounted a few of the students who affected his life in very meaningful ways. Overall, I thought the book was a powerfully strong voice in favor of teaching. I don’t know if McCourt realized how strongly he felt about teaching until he left. Oh yeah, he wrote a book or two after he left teaching and didn’t have all of those ungraded essays staring at him.