techs
Lifer
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/nyregion/16mccourt.html?pagewanted=print
Before Memoirs, He Wrote A's, B's, C's, D's and F's
When Susan Jane Gilman's parents picked up a hitchhiker years ago because he was wearing a Stuyvesant High School T-shirt, they were rewarded with this advice for their Stuyvesant-bound daughter: "Tell her to take Frank McCourt's creative writing class."
And so Ms. Gilman became one of thousands of New York City public school students who, over the years, came to know Frank McCourt not as the Frank McCourt, of "Angela's Ashes" and the Pulitzer Prize, but as Mr. McCourt ("Frank" only behind his back) of Classroom 205.
Long before Mr. McCourt became a literary figure, he was somebody's high school English teacher. In his new memoir, "Teacher Man," published by Scribner, Mr. McCourt recalls the successes (asserting control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom, or introducing students to literary criticism through nursery rhymes) and travails (patronizing supervisors, grading fatigue and parent-teacher conferences) of three decades in the city's public schools.
Of course, Mr. McCourt is not the only one who remembers those years. How, after all, could Joshua M. Price, now 37 and a linguistic anthropologist, forget belting out "Finnegan's Wake" and other Irish drinking songs at the beginning of a creative writing class? How could Zorikh Lequidre, also 37, forget his teacher's positively poetic response - "I see no rivulets of repentance rolling down your cheeks" - to students who apologized for coming to class without their homework?
What a blast. I remember room 205 and my classes with Frank (we all called him Frank).
At the time his brother was the famous one, Malachy McCourt.
Its not every day you see a story in the NY Times about your high school English teacher and about a room you spent so much time in.
Before Memoirs, He Wrote A's, B's, C's, D's and F's
When Susan Jane Gilman's parents picked up a hitchhiker years ago because he was wearing a Stuyvesant High School T-shirt, they were rewarded with this advice for their Stuyvesant-bound daughter: "Tell her to take Frank McCourt's creative writing class."
And so Ms. Gilman became one of thousands of New York City public school students who, over the years, came to know Frank McCourt not as the Frank McCourt, of "Angela's Ashes" and the Pulitzer Prize, but as Mr. McCourt ("Frank" only behind his back) of Classroom 205.
Long before Mr. McCourt became a literary figure, he was somebody's high school English teacher. In his new memoir, "Teacher Man," published by Scribner, Mr. McCourt recalls the successes (asserting control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom, or introducing students to literary criticism through nursery rhymes) and travails (patronizing supervisors, grading fatigue and parent-teacher conferences) of three decades in the city's public schools.
Of course, Mr. McCourt is not the only one who remembers those years. How, after all, could Joshua M. Price, now 37 and a linguistic anthropologist, forget belting out "Finnegan's Wake" and other Irish drinking songs at the beginning of a creative writing class? How could Zorikh Lequidre, also 37, forget his teacher's positively poetic response - "I see no rivulets of repentance rolling down your cheeks" - to students who apologized for coming to class without their homework?
What a blast. I remember room 205 and my classes with Frank (we all called him Frank).
At the time his brother was the famous one, Malachy McCourt.
Its not every day you see a story in the NY Times about your high school English teacher and about a room you spent so much time in.
