Book Report.

Teacher Man
By Frank McCourt

I knew that Frank McCourt had written Angela’s Ashes. I never read it and I didn’t see the movie. I guess I thought it would be kind of an Oprah book thing.

But over the break I did read McCourt’s Teacher Man.

You should read this book.

I knew I was going to like it when I read, "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."

Teacher Man is all about story telling. It tells the story of McCourt telling stories about telling stories in the classroom and getting his students to tell their own stories as well.

McCourt started teaching at a working class high school in Staten Island and ended up thirty years later at the prestigious selective admission Stuyvesant public high school in Manhattan.

If McCourt was only half the teacher he makes himself out to be, he was the high school English teacher I would have wanted.

“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."

Instead, most often subversively, he created his own curriculum -- the McCourt-centered curriculum.

In one episode McCourt has his students read recipes aloud from a cookbook, one of them accompanied by the flute playing of a fellow student and the singing of the student’s mother, the song she sang whenever she cooked the dish. Recipes as stories -- It only takes a minute for his students to get it.

He has them read NY Times restaurant reviewer Mimi Sheraton’s reviews. Then they write their own reviews on the school cafeteria as well their favorite local pizzeria (most of the student reviews of the cafeteria end with “it sucks,” so he hands them back asking for a more descriptive rewrite).

He couldn’t teach his students to diagram a sentence. He couldn’t do it himself. So he tells them stories of his childhood in Ireland, the experience of America as an immigrant, laboring on the docks, struggling through attempts at education, failing at marriage and the trials of life.

And with that he has them tell and then commit to paper their own stories and the stories of their families, their homeland, their neighborhood and their street.

McCourt’s memoir is very timely in this age of forms, guidelines, high stakes exams and snooping from the higher ups.