| Books
No Baloney
‘Teacher Man’ Provides Lessons on Life in the
Classroom
By John Mooney
The first few pages of Frank McCourt’s latest book, Teacher Man (Scribner,
$26), are filled with baloney.
But there is much more to the author’s third memoir than the hilarious
story of how he was almost fired on his first day of teaching at a vocational
high school. During the opening minutes of the first class he ever taught,
a student threw a baloney sandwich across the room. McCourt’s college training
did not prepare him for this occurrence.
I came from behind my desk and made the first sound of my teaching
career: Hey. Four years of higher education at New York University and
all I can think of was Hey… Professors at NYU never lectured on how to
handle flying-sandwich situations. They talked about theories and philosophies
of education, about moral and ethical imperatives… but never about critical
moments in the classroom.
He ordered the student to "Stop throwing sandwiches," although the deed
was already done. So McCourt, who experienced heart-wrenching poverty and
hunger as a child during the Depression in Ireland, did the logical thing
– he ate it.
It was not an ordinary sandwich where meat is slapped between slices
of tasteless white American bread. This bread was dark and thick, baked
by an Italian mother in Brooklyn, bread firm enough to hold slices of rich
baloney, layered with slices of tomato, onions and peppers, drizzled with
olive oil and charged with a tongue-dazzling relish.
This initial act of classroom management, recounted in the eloquent
prose for which he is now famous, nearly cost McCourt his job. The school
principal, who was watching him chew through the door window, promptly
called him into the hallway and reprimanded him for eating lunch instead
of teaching.
Before becoming an international celebrity following the release of
his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, about his impoverished
childhood in Limerick, McCourt spent three decades teaching English to
New York City high school students. By his own estimation, he conducted
at least 33,000 classes and instructed 12,000 students in vocational schools
and later at the elite Stuyvesant High School.
It took McCourt four and a half years to write Teacher Man. He
was unsure what tone he should take in the book, since Angela’s Ashes
was written from the perspective of a child. Ironically, his students in
some ways became mentors because they enabled him to find his literary
voice. He also learned that teachers and students have a bond that unites
them when principals or administrators invaded the classroom. Only once
did he breach the trust of students by calling a parent (the result was
an irate father coming into a class and threatening his son to behave).
McCourt’s teaching methods were unorthodox. He told students about his
background, sang Irish songs such as "Finnegan’s Wake" and "Rocky Road
to Dublin," took 29 rowdy girls to a movie in Times Square, and recited
his favorite poem, Little Bo Peep. He assigned students to read
New
York Times restaurant reviews, write cookbook recipes and craft excuse
notes from Adam or Eve to God (after he discovered the creativity students
used when writing their own blatantly forged parental excuse notes).
Throughout his career, McCourt worked to gain the attention and respect
of unruly, hormonally charged and indifferent adolescents. He found that
the two ways to capture the attention of the American teenager were to
talk about sex or food, noting that he chose food because it’s less likely
to upset parents. All the while, he perfected his story-telling technique
that eventually made him "the Mick of the Moment" and a sought-after "authority
on miseries of all kinds."
After years of self-doubt, firings, a failed marriage and an unsuccessful
attempt to get a doctorate. from Dublin’s Trinity College, McCourt landed
a job at Stuyvesant, New York City’s most prestigious public high school,
where he had a long and prosperous career.
"I had to take off the mask of a Know-It-All teacher," explained the
75-year-old McCourt, who sounded weary after spending most of the day on
telephone interviews. "Kids are lied to all the time by parents, teachers,
politicians, administrators. They want to know the truth."
To his surprise, Teacher Man reached #1 on The New York Times
Best Seller list, as had his two previous efforts, Angela’s Ashes
and its follow up, ’Tis, which recounted his years as a young man
in America. He hopes his new book will spur a national discussion on the
value of teachers, whom he says are underappreciated and grossly underpaid.
His goal is to "celebrate the uncelebrated... teachers are saviors of students
everywhere."
"Look at what they are paid, and look at what athletes make in comparison.
Everyone gets paid more. Don’t be so begrudging when they ask for a pay
raise," McCourt exclaimed.
"People are incredibly patronizing and view teachers as failures. They’ll
say, ‘He’s a science teacher, but he really wanted to be a doctor’. They
should know what it’s like – you just don’t walk in there and start talking.
Teachers are like symphony conductors," said McCourt, who made less than
$40,000 a year and taught summer school, did typing, clerical and dock
work to make ends meet.
"If kids come home and announce they want to be teachers, their parents
are livid. They want them to become doctors, lawyers, businessmen, CEOs,"
said McCourt, whose publicity tour includes numerous presentations to teachers’
groups from now until June. "Teaching is not a profession of last resorts."
He feels strongly about the involvement of politicians in educational
matters, believes the current "No Child Left Behind" legislation "ruins
the atmosphere of the classroom" because of the threat of testing, and
points out the irony that the farther away school officials are removed
from the classroom, the more money they make.
Toward the end of the book, McCourt gains experience, exudes more confidence,
and becomes a success in the classroom, especially after he takes over
the creative writing course. A highlight is an unforgettable vocabulary
lesson/picnic in the park with ethnic foods (marzipan, lasagna, gefilte
fish and Korean kimchee) that caught the attention of the police. He recounts
asking students to describe their family dinners and read cookbook recipes
aloud in class to the accompaniment of musical instruments. A poignant
section details students’ interpretations of a poem called My Papa’s
Waltz by Theodore Roethke that indeed could have been a scene from
McCourt’s own childhood in Limerick.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Far from the poverty of Limerick, Frank McCourt has a country home in
Connecticut, where he did much of his writing. His New York apartment is
near his brother Malachy, the actor/raconteur and author. (The brothers
starred in a two-man play called A Couple of Blaggards that they
wrote together about their upbringing.) He dedicated Teacher Man
to his children, and those of Malachy and his younger brothers Alphie and
Michael. He visits Stuyvesant High every once in a while, most recently
when he met with former pupils at a fund raiser when the book launched
in November. They give him a great response.
"I’ve been on TV. It’s like you are canonized when you are on TV," he
said. "Most teachers aren’t on TV."
Actually, McCourt has been on TV quite a lot, including a Today Show
interview that turned into a Katie Couric giggle-fest when she mispronounced
the name of his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, calling it Angela’s Asses.
McCourt deadpanned that if that were the title, he would have sold 10 times
as many books.
"We didn’t get to talk that much about Teacher Man, but the publicity
was worth a million dollars," said the author, who has appeared on the
CBS Early Show, NPR, and countless local TV programs and newspapers.
His experience and the lessons he learned from the kids "saved me from
being destroyed." They also encouraged him to write a book about his life,
telling him, ‘You’re lucky, Mr. McCourt. You had a miserable childhood
to write about.’ The classroom provided a stage on which he could tell
and retell his stories, in the tradition of a seanachie. Ultimately,
those stories enriched his students and, in turn, he became rich as a senior
citizen.
While his books and the movie rights to Angela’s Ashes made
him wealthy, McCourt is very much down-to-earth. When asked if he ever
had a baloney sandwich as good as the one he picked off the floor of his
classroom, he laughed.
"That sandwich lingers with me forever. Just last week, I had a piece
of baloney wrapped around a pickle, and I enjoyed it. I also like liverwurst.
I have very simple tastes."
Who could have known that a man with such simple tastes could give us
so much food for thought?
 
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