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DiscountDelight - Teacher Man : A Memoir
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List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $11.45
Your Save: $ 14.55 ( 56% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780743243773
ISBN: 0743243773
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2005-11-15
Publisher: Scribner
Release Date: 2005-11-15
Studio: Scribner
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Listening to this book is pure joy
Comment: I will first admit that I am, most likely, the only reader of Teacher Man that has not yet read McCord's Angela's Ashes. I have no excuse except that that I heard so much about it that I thought I had heard the story before. Even Teacher Man held little interest when my wife brought it home from a recent book buying binge. She even manage to get Mr. McCourt to sign the book at the Los Angeles Times book fair at UCLA this year. Then while searching the aisles of the library for a book to listen to while on a business trip I saw Frank McCord had recorded his own book and I thought maybe this would be interesting. Well it was more than interesting, it was amazing. All good fun, and illuminating told with charm and warmth. Stories of a career choice he might not have chosen, students he remembers, and lessons that teacher and student both learn.
Here is where I admit that I too thought I would become a teacher. I didn't. Student teaching taught me one thing. This was a damned hard profession and I had no taste for the discipline one must keep in the classroom. McCourt re-enforces my decision was correct. And I recommend his book to anyone who has the notion they want to enter teaching. This is simply the best book on teaching I have ever heard and read (as I found myself reading large sections of it later).
I really recommend if you can, to listen to the book. McCord has a way of putting you into his story. His writing and reading are simple and declarative which much humor and insight. He says in the text he felt it was his job to open up the path from FEAR to FREEDOM in his students. His latest book is a monument to all the Teachers who attempt to generate creative thinking and know that true education is more than a test score. I doubt McCourt left any students behind. I highly recommend this fine recording and the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Repetitive and dull
Comment: I have never read any of McCourt's work before, but my mother-in-law told me that as an English teacher, I had to read this one. It reads quickly, but I was appalled more than once at McCourt's lack of interest in teaching and his seeming pride in being a mediocre teacher. Mr. McCourt, there is a happy medium between telling stories about your life to students and being one of the hardline teachers. To get respect you have to earn it and it is especially hard to earn the respect of 18 year olds. Very sad indeed......
Customer Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Comment: I think since I heard the audio first, and laughed out loud, I gave a more positive review for the book than some. If I had read it first, I may have been disappointed.
The problem with comparing an author's earlier work is that it is NOT the same story, not always told in the same voice, not for the same purpose, and not necessarily for the same audience. Teacher Man has to be absorbed/critiqued on its own terms.
On its own terms, it is a funny, satirical, and yes, depressing memoir at times. But knowing the author is being honest, it works. I can say I found more compassion or hope in Angela's Ashes, and was disappointed with the lack of real "meat" about teaching 30 years.
I'd suggest, if you get bored reading it, you listen to the audio (check the library--it's free!). The author reads his own work, so interjects his own personal inflection.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but not a "Must Read"
Comment: As a teacher to former teenagers, I could relate with a lot of what Frank tells about. It was very humerous at times. However, he whined a lot more than I had hoped he would in this book. I could not feel sorry for him when he complained.
I enjoyed the fact that he himself reads the story. That's what kept me hooked till the end. It was a nice tale of his life. I did not find it, however, to be a "must read" for educators and anyone else interested in public education in America. Most people already know about the problems we face and have faced for decades. No solutions are offered.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Sing your song, dance your dance, tell your tale." Amen.
Comment: Having read and enjoyed both Angela's Ashes (through blurry eyes) and `Tis, I was looking forward to Teacher Man. I was not disappointed. It is always amazing to me that a child with a truly miserable, even lethal, childhood like the one Frank McCourt endured, survives to adulthood in the first place and then, in McCourt's case, goes on to became a successful teacher and an accomplished writer. It can only be innate talent.
While his method of teaching seemed a bit unorthodox to me in the beginning, I came to see his relaxed, less intimidating style as an appropriate approach with the students he faced every day. Since his primary purpose as a teacher was to teach creative writing, his style seemed to serve his students fairly well. While he didn't reach them all (no teacher does), he reached many of the `unreachable'. His personal stories added a rich texture to the woven fabric of his often spontaneous lessons. They also allowed his students to identify with him in ways they likely could not with many of their other teachers.
McCourt's stream-of-consciousness style of writing worked very well in Teacher Man. His prose flowed smoothly from description and memory recall to discourse. McCourt tells his students that as psychology is the study of the way people behave, "grammar is the study of the way language behaves." Good analogy. He sang to them. They read recipes in class and then put music to them as other students (or, in once case, a mother) prepared them right in class. Because the schools in the New York City School Systems are very cosmopolitan, the recipes and music came from many different cultures. It would seem to me this is excellent fodder for creative writing.
I thoroughly enjoyed Frank McCourt's sense of humor, felt for his constant struggle to find his place in the world and his purpose for being in it, and his greater struggle in coming to terms with his Irish Catholic upbringing. Though some may question his methods, McCourt's experiences as a teacher warm the heart, provide an enormous insight into the minds of adolescents of any stripe, and give the reader a chance to appreciate the effort it takes to reach adolescents in the classroom. I know an excellent high school biology teacher who will get a copy of Teacher Man for Father's Day.
Carolyn Rowe Hill
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Editorial Reviews:
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For 30 years Frank McCourt taught high school English in New York City and for much of that time he considered himself a fraud. During these years he danced a delicate jig between engaging the students, satisfying often bewildered administrators and parents, and actually enjoying his job. He tried to present a consistent image of composure and self-confidence, yet he regularly felt insecure, inadequate, and unfocused. After much trial and error, he eventually discovered what was in front of him (or rather, behind him) all along--his own experience. "My life saved my life," he writes. "My students didn't know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere." At the beginning of his career it had never occurred to him that his own dismal upbringing in the slums of Limerick could be turned into a valuable lesson plan. Indeed, his formal training emphasized the opposite. Principals and department heads lectured him to never share anything personal. He was instructed to arouse fear and awe, to be stern, to be impossible to please--but he couldn't do it. McCourt was too likable, too interested in the students' lives, and too willing to reveal himself for their benefit as well as his own. He was a kindred spirit with more questions than answers: "Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens." As he did so adroitly in his previous memoirs, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt manages to uncover humor in nearly everything. He writes about hilarious misfires, as when he suggested (during his teacher's exam) that the students write a suicide note, as well as unorthodox assignments that turned into epiphanies for both teacher and students. A dazzling writer with a unique and compelling voice, McCourt describes the dignity and difficulties of a largely thankless profession with incisive, self-deprecating wit and uncommon perception. It may have taken him three decades to figure out how to be an effective teacher, but he ultimately saved his most valuable lesson for himself: how to be his own man. --Shawn Carkonen
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