McCourt’s latest honors teachers

Every teacher heading out for spring break should take along sunscreen – and a copy of Frank McCourt’s most recent book, “Teacher Man.”

It’s not McCourt’s best work – his powerful “Angela’s Ashes,” a memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland, won the Pulitzer Prize; and his second autobiographical account, “‘Tis,” was my personal favorite. Yet “Teacher Man” is McCourt’s long-awaited book about his 30-year career as an English teacher and how it laid the foundation for his second career as a writer.

“In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs and surprises he faces in public high schools around New York City,” states the book jacket.

And, that is an understatement. The book actually is a tribute to teachers everywhere and should be required reading for anyone who has the courage to stand before a classroom of skeptical strangers.

Skeptical also may be an understatement, or the correct adjective to describe the students whom teachers face. McCourt worked five days a week, five periods a day to gain the attention and respect of “unruly, hormonally charged or indifferent adolescents.”

This is what he said about teachers and their students:

“Teachers learn, too. After years in the classroom, after facing thousands of teenagers, they have that sixth sense about everyone who enters the room. They see the sidelong glances. They sniff the air of a new class and they can tell if this is a pain-in-the-ass group or one they can work with. They see quiet kids who have to be drawn out and loudmouths who have to be shut up. They can tell by the way a boy sits if he’s going to be cooperative or a great pain.”

Every teacher can identify with McCourt’s struggles. These have been some of mine: In every class there is some female who prefers using an emery board to shape her nails rather than a Thesaurus to improve her writing. In every class is some baseball-cap-wearing guy who’d rather listen to his rock-radio earphones than to your lecture. In every class there are eyes that sparkle with inquiry and eyes blank from boredom.

“The classroom is a place of high drama,” McCourt writes. “You’ll never know what you’ve done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tell when you’ve reached them or alienated them.

“It’s chemistry. It’s psychology. It’s animal instinct. You are with the kids and, as long as you want to be a teacher, there’s no escape.”

McCourt’s apparent success – at New York’s most prestigious school, Stuyvesant High School – was due to his creativity and imagination. His methods were anything but conventional, but he left a lasting impact on his students.

Publishers Weekly said this about “Teacher Man”: “McCourt’s many fans will of course love this book, but it should also be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn’t hurt some politicians to read it, too.”