Hr. lærer (2005)

The author of Angela's Ashes brings us his self-deprecating reflections on a 30 year teaching career. Early on, he laments that teaching-college doesn't prepare you at all for dealing with a real high school classroom. High minded theories of pedogogy don't matter if you can't get the respect and attention of a room full of teenagers that have been in school going on 12 years straight.

His constant self-doubting is incredibly human. He has story after story that recaptures the mental haze of forging his own path. His best moments didn't come because he was a genious and a natural, but because he followed his gut, took a risk, worried about it for quite some time until it finally worked out. Or didn't.

As a teacher with a thick Irish accent in New York City, there's a lot to be learned from his classroom stories about cultural and racial classes. Or the tension of teaching poetry to New York's future dockworkers and hair dressers. Or dealing with parents that have a very low idea of teachers.

For me, leaving construction work and grassroots organizing behind to go into teaching, this book has been more insightful than any of the classes I've taken so far. ( )

¿Qué hace un profesor si en su primer día de clase un bocadillo vuela por los aires? No sabemos lo que harían otros, pero el profesor McCourt en su primer día de clase en el Instituto McKee de Nueva York lo recogió del suelo y se lo comió, para gran sorpresa de sus alumnos.

There are teacher and then there are the kind of teacher that Frank McCourt was. Here he tells of his 30-year career teaching English in New York City high schools. He was scared to death on his first day…and who wouldn’t be, facing a room of 16-year-olds at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, where his job was to teach five English classes per day to teenagers who were never expected to go any higher than 12th grade…if that. The year was 1958 and Frank McCourt was 27 years old and just out of New York University himself. One doesn’t have to be a teacher to appreciate his account of how reading the students’ obviously self-authored absence excuses inspired him to create a composition assignment they couldn’t resist: write a note of excuse from Adam to God. I would have loved to have tacked that one. At 38, he left for a doctoral program at Dublin’s Trinity College, returning two years later without a degree. That is a story for another book. He relates two of his most memorable teaching experiences… a vocabulary lesson involving a picnic in the park with ethnic foods brought by students in his creative-writing class, and a recipe-as-poetry class in which students read recipes aloud to the accompaniment of assorted musical instruments. As I said there are teachers and then there are teachers like Frank McCourt. If you read his memoirs’ you’ll be more than just entertained…you’ll be enlightened. ( )

Every word was wonderful. McCourt's insights to the working of the adolescent mind are right on.
( )

Instead of focusing on teaching, this book gives us his feelings about being a teacher. All his self-doubt and insecurities are hanging out here. You might think that sounds like a boring book, but he's got quite a gift of gab and keeps your intention.
Mixed in with classroom scenes are stories about his childhood, his time working on the docks or in restaurants. One of the most telling stories was his interaction with Benny, a large boy with a reputation for being a bully and disruptive. Frank pulls his feet out from under him, before Benny has a chance to attack him. Later Benny tells him about the karate master he studied under who made him clean toilets for 6 weeks before accepting him as a student. Benny tells Frank "I knew you had to save your ass and that was OK with me because I didn't need that world...If you have to act like a big-ass teacher you should go home and clean the toilet." (p. 155-7). It doesn't sound like much in this review, but it hit me when I read it about how much life learning Frank was getting by being a teacher. We can see how slowly he begins to learn self-acceptance and personal understanding...qualities he doesn't start out with.