Teacher Man
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Teacher Man is a 2005 memoir written by Frank McCourt which describes and reflects on his teaching experiences in New York high schools and colleges.
His pedagogy involves the students taking responsibility for their own learning, especially in his first school, McKee Vocational and Technical High School, New York. On the first day he nearly gets fired for eating a sandwich, and the second day he nearly gets fired for joking that in Ireland, people go out with sheep after a student asks them if Irish people date. Much of his early teaching involves telling ancedotes about his childhood in Ireland, which were covered in his earlier books Angela's Ashes and 'Tis.
He then taught English as a Second Language, and took some African American students to a production of Hamlet. He talks about when he was training as a teacher and didn't know anything about George Santayana, but was able to give a well-prepared lesson on the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Other highlights include his connection between how a pen works and how a sentence works (in explaining subjects and grammar, an area which he struggled with himself) and his use of realia like the students' excuse notes and cookbooks.
His teaching took place from the time he was twenty-seven and continued thirty years later. Most of his teaching took place at Stuyvesant High School, where he taught English and Creative Writing. An example of how far he has come as a teacher finding his own voice is when he describes two contrasting Open Days. The first is when a young girl encourages the parents to talk to McCourt afterwards if they want to stay longer and hear his stories; but she attracts ire from the parents because she has feminist ambitions which were probably not appropriate for the late 1950s. During the second Open House he is far more confident.
He earned a Teacher of the Year award in 1976. During the time of the book he went to Trinity College to try to take his doctorate, but he ended up leaving his first wife under the stress.
