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Yo, Teacher Man
Author of Angela's Ashes talks about his days in the classroom

by Lory Hough

It was about as close to a standup routine as a former teacher-turned- author can get. When Frank McCourt, best known for his memoir, Angela's Ashes, came to the Ed School in December to talk about his third book, Teacher Man, he poked fun at everything from the Catholic Church to Irish mothers to his own struggles with becoming a school teacher. And the 76 year-old did it all without missing a beat.

"Professors of education at New York University never lectured on how to handle flying-sandwich situations," he said, reading from Teacher Man, released in 2005 but now out in paperback.

McCourt was telling a story about his first day teaching at a vocational school in 1958 on Staten Island, not long after he graduated from college. (Without a high school diploma.) Just after he walked in to the room, two students (including a boy named Petey, who would later yell out, 'Yo, Teacher Man!') started arguing over a bologna sandwich. Eventually the sandwich went flying and landed on the floor.

"I said, 'Hey.' That was the first word I uttered as a teacher, after four years of higher education at New York University. 'Hey.'"

Unsure what to do next as the students waited for his response, McCourt did something completely unexpected -- something that earned the respect of the teenagers.

"I ate the sandwich," he said.

It was responses like this that allowed him to reach students during his 30 years as a teacher in ways that got them to do work they might normally have resisted, like analyzing poetry. (McCourt again did the unexpected, reading poems like "Little Bo Peep" and "Humpty Dumpty.")

"I seized things that enabled me to survive in the classroom," he said. "There was a doggedness to my methods, although, in truth, I didn't really have methods."

He said he learned quickly that a teacher isn't just a teacher. "They're everything in the classroom. A coach, a therapist, a singer, a rabbi, a parent, a friend," he said. "A 45-minute class is the most dramatic thing. It's a one-act play with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you're the director, the stage manager, the makeup person. You're everything."

McCourt, known for his wry delivery and clearly comfortable in front of a crowd, had the overflow audience laughing nonstop as he continued to tell stories, some about his self-described "miserable" childhood growing up poor with a single mother in Ireland under the weight of the Catholic Church.

"Limbo. This was another one I could never understand. A lot of you here are not Catholics. This is where you're going," he said.

As a kid in Limerick, he said they'd sit around the schoolyard talking about where the church said go, depending on how good or bad they were.

"Heaven, hell, limbo, purgatory -- our various destinations," he said. "One kid said, 'We're not going anywhere. We're going to America.' This was our conditioning."

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About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

photgraph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office