Frank McCourt Looks Back on a Life in Teaching

Posted on November 16, 2005

Frank McCourt is best known to his readers as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Angela's Ashes. But he spent most of his life as a teacher in New York City's public school system where he taught high school English.

In his new memoir, Teacher Man (Scribner), McCourt reflects back on his life as a teacher and his somtimes unusual approach to teaching (He once asserted control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom). He also discusses the incredible difficulties most teachers have today and why government interference is ruining schools.

In a telephone interview from his home in Connecticut, Mr. McCourt acknowledged that if a friend had not told him about an opening at Stuyvesant, where disciplinary problems were virtually nonexistent and supervisors gave him tremendous latitude, his public school teaching career would have most likely ended years earlier.
He lamented the onslaught of gadgets that today's educators have to contend with, saying, "If I were a teacher now I'd have a sign that says, 'If you have a cellphone, I'm going to step on it,' " and likened politicians' efforts to improve education to "interfering with a couple in the bedroom."
"Teachers are treated like the downstairs maid," he said. "If there's a panel on television on education and the schools, do you ever see a teacher? No. Chancellors, politicians, someone from a think tank." In fact, Mr. McCourt said that while he had been "scribbling" memories since his earliest days as a teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, it was only after he retired from Stuyvesant in 1987 that he was able to write in earnest. "The books, the notes, the paperwork, the names that you have to memorize, the individual problems, and to read all this stuff that you take home, it's overwhelming," he said.
In recent years, Mr. McCourt has found himself once again inundated, and among the culprits are some familiar names. "Now they're all writing, they're all sending me manuscripts, and it's driving me crazy," he said. Then he chuckled, adding, "'If he can do it, why can't I?' is what they're saying to themselves."

Teacher Man is in bookstores now.