Teacher Man

McCourt was born in New York City, in 1930, to Irish immigrants. When he was four years old, his family moved back to Ireland, where he grew up in impoverished circumstances. At age 19, having saved his money from various jobs, he sailed for New York and resided there for the rest of his life. In 1951, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years before returning to New York. There he worked and enrolled at New York University with the help of the G.I Bill. He graduated with a B.A. in English in 1957 and began his teaching career the following year. In the 1960s, he earned his master’s degree from Brooklyn College and began a doctoral program at Trinity College in Dublin, which he didn’t complete. He began teaching at Stuyvesant High School in 1971, retiring from there in 1987.

In 1996, McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, a memoir of his first 19 years of life. It was a surprise bestseller and won a National Book Critics Circle Award that year and a Pulitzer Prize the following year. He followed that up three years later with ’Tis, another memoir, which picked up where his first book left off. He was thus both an experienced teacher and an accomplished writer by the time Teacher Man came out in 2005.

As this is a memoir, McCourt is the main figure in the book. He’s really the only one, as not even his first wife, Alberta, is presented in much detail or complexity. She and the other characters appear to varying degrees in a series of vignettes throughout the text. McCourt’s style is light and humorous, and always self-deprecating. While other characters are part of funny passages, the humor comes more from the situation, as he never gets a laugh at their expense. The only person he directly laughs at sometimes is himself.

The arc of how McCourt presents himself in the book is that of someone naïve and insecure eventually picking up knowledge and experience from life over time. He openly admits to not having the answers—any answers—early in his life and career. He writes of instances in which he wishes he were more proactive or knew what to say. His main virtue is simply perseverance. He lost a number of teaching positions and failed to finish his doctorate, but he never gave up. As he taught more, he gained insights into both his students and his teaching methods, and over time began to feel comfortable in the classroom. His style of teaching was unconventional and student-focused. Likewise, he trusts his students and they teach him as much as he teaches them. In his last position, at Stuyvesant High School in the 1970s, he finally achieves the confidence and charisma as a teacher that eluded him for so long.