McCourt Recalls Years as ‘Teacher Man’

Frank McCourt, former high school English teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, told stories of the 30 years he spent teaching New York teenagers—whom he described as “either hungry or horny”—last night at the Gutman Conference Center of the Graduate School of Education (GSE).

Introduced by GSE Dean Kathleen McCartney as a writer able “to inhabit the mind of a seven-year-old child with great authenticity,” McCourt approached the podium with no notes and only a copy of his latest memoir, “Teacher Man,” in hand.

“I never thought I’d end up at Harvard. I never even went to high school,” said McCourt, beginning a speech that kept the audience laughing.

Drawing on material from his memoir, he reflected on his Irish education and childhood as compared with those of his New Yorker students.

“We had the victim-type education,” McCourt said of the Irish, which “conditioned” them to believe they were a “fighting race” of Catholics who “hated the English, but [were] always betrayed by some son of a bitch.”

His teaching of high school students in New York, by contrast, was more unorthodox, he said, describing that they spent class periods crafting excuse notes for creative writing assignments, assigning themselves grades, or studying the “deeper meanings” of Little Bo Beep and Humpty Dumpty.

They also invented obituaries for their teachers—“not [one] had a peaceful passing,” he added.

Never confining his teaching to a syllabus, McCourt said, “I had no methods. I shot from the hip...I was able to seize things that allowed me to survive in the classroom.”

Jokes aside, McCourt reminded his audience, which included many educators, that “the kids can sense your passion, or lack of it.”

“If you don’t have it,” he said, “they turn you off and you’re dead.”

Many of the anecdotes from his speech appear in “Teacher Man,” which was published last year as the third installment of McCourt’s autobiographical series.

The first two memoirs, “Angela’s Ashes,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and “‘Tis,” recount the writer’s upbringing in Limerick, Ireland.

Audience member and former co-director of external relations at the GSE, Dottie V. Engler described McCourt as “the kind of guy you could only dream to [be] sitting next to at a bar.”

The audience echoed the sentiment, giving him a standing ovation.

“A couple of things he said about facing students rang so true that I had tears in my eyes,” Hatsy Hoder, a GSE affiliate, said.