The Education of Frank McCourt

‘Yo, Teach!’ a voice boomed. Frank McCourt scanned the adolescents in his classroom. It was the fall of 1970 and his first week of teaching at Seward Park High School, which sat in the midst of dilapidated tenement buildings on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

McCourt located the speaker and nodded. ‘You talk funny,’ the student said, ‘Where ya from?’

‘Ireland,¡ McCourt replied. With more than ten years of teaching experience under his belt, this kind of interrogation no longer surprised him. But one question in particular still made him feel embarrassed ‘Where’d you go to high school?’ someone else asked.

If I tell them the truth, they’ll feel superior to me, McCourt thought. They’ll throw it in my face. Most of all, he feared an accusation he had heard before –from himself: You come from nothing, so you are nothing.

But McCourt’s heart whispered another possibility: Maybe these kids are willing to find a way of figuring out this new teacher. Am I willing to risk being humiliated in the classroom to find out?

‘ Come on, tell us! Where’d you go to high school?’

‘I never did,’ McCourt replied.

‘Did you get thrown out?’

I was right, the teacher thought. They’re curious. McCourt he’d left school after the eighth grade to take a job.

‘How’d you get to be a teacher, then?’ they asked. ‘When I came to America,’ he began.

…

By then I’d done a lot of reading on my own, so I persuaded New York University to enroll me.’

A born storyteller, McCourt drew from a repertoire of accounts about his youth. His students loved to listen, very interested by the gritty details, drawn by something more powerful than curiosity. He’d look from face to face, recognizing a bit of himself in each sober gaze.

Since humor had been the McCourts’ weapon against life’s miseries in Limerick, he used it to describe those days. ‘Dinner usually was bread and tea,’ he told the students. ‘Mam used to say, ‘we’ve got our balanced diet: a solid and a liquid. What more could we want?’

The students roared with laughter.