50 pages • 1 hour read
Frank McCourtTeacher Man
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Learning from Experience
One main theme of the text is learning from experience. As McCourt presents it, it applies to both life and teaching. In both areas, he begins almost as a blank slate—admittedly clueless, ignorant, naïve. His fears—of life, taking action, asserting himself—hold him back for a while, but whatever happens, he continues to pursue his career. As he writes in the Prologue, he has “one virtue: doggedness. Not as glamorous as ambition or talent or intellect or charm, but still the one thing that got me through the days and nights” (2).
As time goes on, he learns through active experience—including through making mistakes. He also learns to let go of his insecurities, and to engage more directly with life and his students. We see this reflected in his teaching as the book progresses. Chapter 7, for example, is full of failures and regrets for not doing more when students needed it. At McKee, his first teaching job, Augie, Sal, Louise, and Kevin were all students in need of support, of wise advice, and McCourt describes himself as failing to provide what they needed from him. He ends each anecdote by saying he wish he’d done more to help them or handled things differently. As he writes about Kevin, the difficult student who goes missing in the Vietnam War, “I didn’t know enough, or I was too shy to show affection” (99).
By the time he works at Stuyvesant High School in the 1970s, McCourt has matured and learned from experience. In contrast to the episodes in Chapter 7, when Phyllis tells the story of her father dying on the night of the first moonwalk (Chapter 16), McCourt knows just what to do—he embraces her and walks her back to her seat. It’s the fulfillment of a hope expressed back in Chapter 7: “Someday I’d comfort someone in the hall with the strong arm around the shoulder, the soft word, the hug” (95).
All of it comes from persevering, being observant, and being present. Though the focus in the book is on his teaching career, the same dynamic plays out in his life in general. Describing his thoughts on board the Queen Elizabeth in Chapter 11, he felt as if he is just meandering through life. Arguably, it was through this meandering that in the end he found his purpose and learned what he needed to know. As he writes early in Chapter 1, “I learned through trial and error and paid a price for it. I had to find my own way of being a man and a teacher and that is what I struggled with for thirty years in and out of the classrooms of New York” (20).
The Purpose of Education
Another main theme running through the text is the purpose of education. It’s there in the background of every classroom scene described and every interaction McCourt has with other teachers and administrators. He even raises the issue overtly a time or two. In a conversation with other teachers about the expectations of their students’ parents, one teacher remarks that parents see them as “workers on an assembly line sticking a little part in here, another little part in there till the finished product comes out at the end all ready to perform for parent and corporation” (235). When he questions his own methods in the classroom, he asks himself rhetorically what schools are for—“to supply cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex? Are we shaping packages for the corporate assembly line?” (211).
It’s clear from the book that McCourt rejects this way of thinking. He’s not strict in his approach, and although he believes in higher education, he appears to be against its reduction to a mere status symbol or as a stepping stone to a more comfortable lifestyle. Ultimately, McCourt suggests that education is about critically observing the world and discovering oneself and others. One writing assignment he gives his students is to interview their grandparents about their lives when they were young. To many students’ surprise, they not only learn some history but see their grandparents in an entirely new light. It’s eye-opening and enriching—and deepens their familial relationships. This suggests that the true purpose of education is much more than learning a dry collection of facts. Above all, as he writes in Chapter 16, education should free people by removing the fear that inhibits them.
Almost a corollary to this theme is the relationship between teachers and students. There are teachers for whom the subject matter is the main focus, “pour[ing] knowledge into empty vessels”—the students (102). This approach assumes that the teacher has nothing to learn, something McCourt rejects. He tells his students at one point that he’s learning as much or more than they are. Furthermore, another large part of learning has to do with interpersonal relationships: The bonds between students, and between students and teacher. McCourt’s own relationships with his students demonstrate the value he places on forging genuine connections with them as individual people. McCourt ends a few anecdotes that are particularly poignant or challenging by noting it is something that everyone in the class will remember throughout their lives. McCourt presents this deepened sense of empathy and closer community as a worthwhile lesson in its own right.
The Writing Life
A third theme in the book is the writing life. Though the main topic of the book is teaching, McCourt is in charge of creative writing at Stuyvesant, so his writing advice comes through in his stories about the classroom. He wants his students to be open to everything they encounter and experience. Nothing is too trivial, he argues. As he writes at one point, “everything is grist to our mill” (225).
This is especially true for the students when mining aspects of their own lives and families. McCourt comically writes that students often say they wish their own background was as miserable as his because then they’d have something interesting to write about. Their own lives are boring, they tell him, but he tells them that isn’t true. All lives are interesting and can be presented in an engaging way.
McCourt gradually appears to learn—for himself as much as for his students—that the writing life is not something external and self-contained that one must seek in a particular place or within a particular group. At various times in his teaching career, he wishes he could quit and pursue a different career where exciting things happen. He envies professors for their free time and the literary milieu he envisions them living in. At Trinity College, he forever seeks the elusive literary group of his imagination. As time goes on, however, he seems to realize that his own experience provides plenty of material for writing. He’s surprised early in his teaching career by how much his students enjoy his stories about growing up in Ireland, and perhaps he sees a potential audience for them. Indeed, these stories would turn into his first, Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Angela’s Ashes. Thirty years in New York City classrooms provide another goldmine of material. On his last day of teaching, a student tells him he should write a book—and here it is.
