Journal Entry 1 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi Finland on Monday, March 08, 2010

From the Publishers Weekly review posted on amazon:

This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela's Ashes and continued in 'Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt's 30-year teaching career in New York City's public high schools. All McCourt wanted to do was teach... Pretty soon he realized the system wasn't run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write "excuse notes" from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It's about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt's many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn't hurt some politicians to read it, too.

A colleague was cleaning out her bookshelves and I took this and a few other titles to register for bookcrossing. I had happened across part of Angela's Ashes on tv, but otherwise knew really nothing about McCourt. I skimmed through this, and found it a mixed bag. Some of his lessons sounded great, but I do think that letting his students side-track him into telling stories would be a problem if it happened too often. As a college lecturer, I feel ambivalent about his repeated insistence that we have it easy compared to high school teachers. I do take his point that I don't face *anything* like the discipline problems a high school teacher would face, but it doesn't mean my job is a cake-walk either. ;)

I love the picture of a retired high school teacher becoming a publishing sensation, and suddenly being able to afford posh hotels to write in!