Reviews for Teacher man
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
McCourt's latest memoir focuses on what 'Tis (1999) gave short shrift to: his life as a teacher. The same dark humor, lyric voice and gift for dialogue are apparent here as McCourt tells the tale of a 30-year career teaching English in New York City high schools. He begins with his scary first day facing a roomful of 16-year-olds at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, where his job was to teach five English classes per day to teenagers preparing for futures as plumbers, carpenters and auto mechanics. The year was 1958 and McCourt was 27, just out of New York University. One doesn't have to be a teacher to relish his account of how reading the students' obviously self-authored absence excuses inspired him to create a composition assignment they couldn't resist: write a note of excuse from Adam to God. After eight years of stifling bureaucracy at McKee, McCourt taught briefly at New York Community College in Brooklyn, Fashion Industries High School and Seward Park on the Lower East Side. At 38, he left for a doctoral program at Dublin's Trinity College, returning two years later without a degree. (That misadventure could fill another book.) After drifting as a substitute teacher for a year, he landed a job at prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where thousands of the city's top students compete for a few hundred spots. McCourt's self-deprecating tone diminishes in this section, for now this innovative teacher is given free rein, and it is clear that he's having a grand time. He recalls an unforgettable vocabulary lesson involving a picnic in the park with ethnic foods brought by students in his creative-writing class, and a recipe-as-poetry class in which students read recipes aloud to the accompaniment of assorted musical instruments. The teaching profession's loss is the reading public's gain, entirely. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
The phenomenally best-selling author on the value of teaching-and the value of storytelling in teaching. With a big tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
In another easily embraceable memoir by the best-selling (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) author of Angela's Ashes (1996) and 'Tis (1999), McCourt now concentrates on his career as a teacher for many years in the New York City public school system, where he worked in four different high schools. His trademark charm, wit, and unself-conscious self-effacement ensure that the flashbacks of his dreadful days growing up in extreme deprivation in Ireland don't sink the narrative in self-pity. Remembrances of his struggling days in college in New York (dozing years ) provide informative foundation for the real point of the book: relating his development into the kind of teacher he became--namely, one who shares his life stories not only to establish bridges of experience with his students but also to get them to open up. His new book is hardly a teaching manual; however, what it is on one level is a tough but poignant and certainly eloquent defense of the sacrifices and honorableness of those in the teaching profession (Teaching is the downtown maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back ) and a lesson itself in taking yourself seriously--but not too. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Here is the long-anticipated final installment in the trilogy of memoirs by Pulitzer Prize winner McCourt (Angela's Ashes). His previous volumes told the tale of his life through many categories of struggle and triumph, from a poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick to a return to his birthplace, New York City, and his quest there for a better existence. In Teacher Man, however, McCourt focuses upon his particular journey as a teacher in New York City public school classrooms, from his first day in front of a class at a vocational high school in Staten Island-he had not graduated from high school himself but had talked his way into NYU for a college degree covered by the GI Bill-to his accomplishments as a veteran instructor, skilled in unorthodox methods of teaching English and creative writing to exceptional students. McCourt's characteristically vivid storytelling, with his rendering of the distinct and searing voices of particular students, enables his readers to see, hear, and feel this story, a voyage of discovery for students and teacher and, ultimately, all who read this marvelous book. A particular interest in the teaching profession is not required: Teacher Man relates to us all. Every bit as good as Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, this is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/015.]-Mark Bay, Cumberland Coll. Lib., Williamsburg, KY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly
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This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela's Ashes and continued in 'Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt's 30-year teaching career in New York City's public high schools, which began at McKee Vocational and Technical in 1958. His first day in class, a fight broke out and a sandwich was hurled in anger. McCourt immediately picked it up and ate it. On the second day of class, McCourt's retort about the Irish and their sheep brought the wrath of the principal down on him. All McCourt wanted to do was teach, which wasn't easy in the jumbled bureaucracy of the New York City school system. Pretty soon he realized the system wasn't run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. "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. 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." As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write "excuse notes" from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It's about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt's many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn't hurt some politicians to read it, too. (Nov. 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
