Yale Bulletin and Calendar

December 8, 2000Volume 29, Number 13



It was during his 30 years of teaching that Frank McCourt began the groundwork for his memoirs "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis," he said during a visit to campus on Dec. 4. He began making notes of his memories of Ireland in response to his students' questions about his life in that country.



Author McCourt shares memories of his teaching days

Frank McCourt had never set foot in a high school before he began teaching in one in New York City at the age of 27.

McCourt was dumbfounded when he found himself facing a classroom of unruly students at McKee Vocational and Technical High School in Staten Island. His first words as a teacher were "Stop throwing sandwiches," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Angela's Ashes" and its best-selling sequel, "'Tis," recalled in a talk before a capacity crowd in the lecture hall of the Yale University Art Gallery. McCourt's campus visit was sponsored by the gallery and Atticus Bookstore.

Now working on a new book, which he described as a work "in the twilight zone between a novel and a memoir" about the "chemistry of teaching," McCourt focused much of his talk on his own experience in the field, sharing some of the same anecdotes he recounted in "'Tis," his memoir about his emigration from Ireland to the United States, where he taught for 30 years before devoting his energy to full-time writing.

McCourt told his audience that he had expected his high school classes in America to be like those he had seen in television movies while growing up in Ireland, in which "everyone is happy and bouncy," and "with beautiful white teeth." He was chagrined to instead find himself intimidated by troubled teenagers with "raging hormones" who were more interested in sex, romance and their physical appearance than in the social studies and English courses he was assigned to teach them.

When given the job at McKee in 1958, McCourt recalled, he was introduced to his predecessor, who was retiring. He walked into her classroom and saw her perusing travel brochures. She immediately issued her replacement a warning, telling McCourt that he would be "better off working with chimpanzees at the Bronx Zoo."

"I was thrown into a cauldron," McCourt said, adding that his first lesson was "how to save myself."

McCourt read excerpts from "'Tis" describing his students' disinterest in their subjects and their desperate efforts to distract him from class assignments by begging to go to the bathroom or the school nurse or claiming they lacked paper and pens. While frustrated by their lack of focus on education, the author said he soon realized that his students, many of whom were poor and members of minority groups, were not unlike himself when he arrived in America.

"They had simple aspirations," McCourt recalled. "They wanted just to become part of the mainstream, to be 'one of the boys,' one of the kids. But they couldn't; they had language problems, culture problems or a problem of skin color."

McCourt described how he felt the same feelings of isolation when he came to the United States, where he first worked in menial jobs in New York City and was treated with disrespect as he scraped to survive. "I was an animal in New York," he said of his early days in this country. "I was an animal in the streets, an animal in my jobs. I was a rodent." Later drafted by the Army in the Korean War, he was sent to Germany to train attack dogs as part of the Canine Corps -- "the best training for teaching," he quipped. After completing his service, with funding from the GI bill, McCourt managed to convince New York University to accept him as a college student despite the fact that he had dropped out of school in Ireland at the age of 13. His university professors, he said, exposed him to books but were uninspiring.

Likewise, McCourt said, his Limerick teachers also failed him as role models. He attended the Leamy National School, which was populated by children from the city's slums. The school, he noted, was meant for children destined to become messenger boys or to emigrate from Ireland. "You never dreamed of going to University if you went there," he told his audience. "They should have had a slogan saying 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'"

The school, McCourt continued, "brainwashed" its students by drilling Irish history and other subjects and forcing them to memorize everything, including pages and pages of poetry. "If you missed lines you were in for it," the author recalled, describing how students were hit with straps and canes for whatever his teachers deemed punishable. "Everything was beaten into you. ... We memorized everything and didn't think."

The author did develop an appreciation for books, however, which were so scarce in the Limerick slums that they seemed a precious commodity to the young McCourt and many of his neighbors, he said. "Because we had no electricity, we had to read them under a streetlamp. The books went from one family to another. ... It was community; it was a slum university in a sense."

His own educational deprivation caused him to be shocked by the American educational system, McCourt said.

"I was amazed by kids raising their hands and saying 'I think ...'," he commented. "Here, you get points for participation."

McCourt told his audience that it took him 15 years before he felt comfortable in his role as a teacher. After McKee, he went on to teach at several other high schools, including Manhattan's Stuyvesant High, which he described as "the jewel in the crown of New York City education."

In spite of the challenges of teaching, McCourt said that it was his students who eventually propelled him into writing. Partly as a ploy to avoid schoolwork and partly because they were interested, they often asked him questions about his life growing up in Ireland. Their questions inspired him to begin writing down little notes, including lists of the names of streets in Ireland, the names of priests, neighbors and teachers, his mother's sayings and other memories that eventually became the 'groundwork" for his acclaimed memoirs.

Retiring from teaching, McCourt said, was a dramatic moment in his life which caused him to reflect on the experience and later share it in his books. "It's a time when you look back, whether joyfully, sadly or bitterly," he said. "I'm glad that I did it. I hope I was useful."

-- By Susan Gonzalez


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