Many lessons to teach, more to learn

Teacher Man

A Memoir

Frank McCourt

Scribner: 258 pp., $26

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FRANK McCOURT’S first book, “Angela’s Ashes,” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and sold millions of copies. “ ‘Tis,” its thin, disappointing sequel, managed to sell millions more. Now comes “Teacher Man,” the third of McCourt’s memoirs. One might be forgiven for wondering if this very winning Irish American author’s recollecting act is getting a bit old, his blarney running stale. Yet “Teacher Man” is, in fact, the best book in the trilogy, an enthralling work of autobiographical storytelling.

Perhaps this enthusiasm will make better sense if I confess that I was in the tiny minority who thought “Angela’s Ashes” overrated. Yes, young McCourt’s childhood travails in Limerick, Ireland, were engaging, but they had the over-rehearsed quality of anecdotes too often told. What’s more, their author had taken such pains to re-create the myopia of youthful confusion that the book read more like fiction than autobiography; I missed the double perspective of reflection on prior experience that classic memoirs supply. There was one final problem: Because children are presumed innocent, the boy protagonist of “Angela’s Ashes” tended to be bathed in a victimized, self-approving aura.

These defects have been corrected in “Teacher Man,” which shows the adult McCourt committing follies aplenty and describing them with wry retrospective insight. He is more than willing to look back on his own embarrassing past and portray himself in comic terms as an insecure Irish schlemiel. McCourt is not only self-deprecating, but he’s also savvy about it: “If self-denigration is the race,” he writes, “I am the winner, even before the starting gun.”

As the book begins, McCourt is 27 and about to embark on a career as a New York City high school teacher. His education courses have ill-prepared him for the realities of the classroom. Worried that he is rising above his station, he soon discovers the low esteem in which secondary school teachers are held in this society and tries to advance himself by getting a doctorate (never managing to write his dissertation ) and teaching in community colleges. Yet he always returns to the high school classroom, partly because he is a screw-up and partly because he has a genuine gift for working with adolescents.

What he discovers, at first haltingly and then with confidence, is the age-old secret of how to teach: “You have to develop your own style, your own techniques. You have to tell the truth or you’ll be found out.” Most important, “Find out what you love and do it.” As an example, he allows students to head him off from a grammar lesson by asking about his childhood, encouraging them to think of him as a human being. He teaches the art of the excuse note, drawing from his students’ samples: “Here was American high school writing at its best -- raw, real, urgent, lucid, brief, lying.” Deciding that what really matters to teenagers is sex and food, he focuses on food, getting his class to read favorite family recipes aloud to musical accompaniment, holding gourmet picnics in the park and comparing restaurant critics’ prose. These assignments might fall flat if copied by another teacher; the point is for each teacher to work with his or her enthusiasms and translate them into educational practice.

Anyone who has ever faced a classroom of yawning, slouching adolescents will recognize the accuracy of McCourt’s descriptions and applaud his honesty. About one teenage boy, he writes, “I look back at his cold stare and wonder if I should try to win him over or destroy him completely.” At another point, he confesses: “My head feels hot and I want to shout, Why are you so damn stupid? ... Why can’t you just look at this sentence and, for once in your miserable teenage existence, make an attempt to learn.” Out of frustration, he submits to dubious impulses; he slaps a rude kid with a magazine and asks students to write 150-word suicide notes. But always, he sympathizes with the kids as individuals embedded in difficult, complicated lives. And always, he bonds with them against the higher-ups, the department heads and principals. Having immigrated and started at the bottom, he is a fellow underdog. “I disliked anyone with power over me,” he explains, “bosses, bishops, college professors, tax examiners, foremen in general.”

After decades of subverting the rigid curriculum with personal inventions that often land him in trouble, McCourt finally gets a job at the elite Stuyvesant High School, where a benign department chair tells him: “Teach whatever you like.” He is in heaven, or should be, but he continues to be ingenious, as he puts it, at making himself miserable. Even when his creative writing classes become wildly popular, he has “the nagging doubt I was teaching under false pretenses.” Maybe the students are there because he’s an easy mark?

What gives “Teacher Man” its spine is the tight focus on day-to-day teaching. For an activity that consumes so much labor and funding, education is consistently under-reported. To publishers, its glamour is nil, unless it can be used to reflect a topical crisis. Here, McCourt mocks his lover June’s ambition to work for a year in the schools and write a scathing indictment that will become a bestseller. He stays in the trenches for more than three decades, teaching, by his count, 33,000 classes; when he details the day-to-day grind and satisfactions he knows the score. With “Teacher Man,” McCourt deserves to join that small coterie of classic pedagogic memoirists, including Sylvia Ashton-Warner, John Holt, Herbert Kohl, James Herndon and Jonathan Kozol.

While aware that students think that “[b]elow the belly button the teacher is dead,” McCourt knows it takes a whole human being, sensually as well as intellectually awake, to make a good teacher. Lest one think this book is only about teaching, he interjects juicy, bittersweet vignettes about his relations with women, his experiences working on the docks, his divorce and reentry to bachelorhood, and his misadventures at the fringes of the New York and Dublin literary scenes, including a priceless portrait of Edward Dahlberg as a pompous windbag. In the end, McCourt became a literary lion -- just reward for a man who has certainly paid his dues.

One of the curious dynamics in “Teacher Man” is McCourt’s lingering ambivalence toward self-analysis. Willing to call on his Catholic school training to confess his sins, he admits, “I had no talent for introspection.” At one point, his first wife, Alberta, insists that he go into therapy to save their marriage; McCourt gives a hilarious account of himself as a shy Irishman, desperate to show “how reasonable and balanced” he is, failing to compete with garrulously neurotic New York analysands. There is a more self-scrutiny in this book than in McCourt’s previous ones, but his literary technique is still prone to comic schtick and manic stream-of-consciousness reveries, developing insights through controlled irony.

“Teacher Man,” a slender book, may strike some readers as more casual, less burnished than “Angela’s Ashes”; that work will doubtless continue to occupy a respected place in the literature of the memoir. But it seems that McCourt is still learning on the job, as he did in the classroom, and his latest effort marks a considerable advance in honesty, complexity and humanity.

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Phillip Lopate is the author of “Being With Children” and “Waterfront.”