Teacher Man: A Memoir (3 page)

I said nothing.

The principal said he was there to help me because, Ha, ha, I looked like I might need a lot of help. I’ll admit, he said, you had their full attention. OK, but see if you can do it in a less dramatic way. Try teaching. That’s what you’re here for, young man. Teaching. Now you have ground to recover. That’s all. No eating in class for teacher or student.

I said, Yes, sir, and he waved me back to the classroom.

The class said, What’d he say?

He said I shouldn’t eat my lunch in the classroom at nine a.m.

You wasn’t eatin’ no lunch.

I know, but he saw me with the sandwich and told me not to do it again.

Man, that’s unfair.

Petey said, I’ll tell my mom you liked her sandwich. I’ll tell her you got in a lot of trouble over her sandwich.

All right, Petey, but don’t tell her you threw it away.

Naw, naw. She’d kill me. She’s from Sicily. They get excited over there in Sicily.

Tell her it was the most delicious sandwich I ever had in my life, Petey.

OK.

Mea culpa.

Instead of teaching, I told stories.

Anything to keep them quiet and in their seats.

They thought I was teaching.

I thought I was teaching.

I was learning.

And you called yourself a teacher?

I didn’t call myself anything. I was more than a teacher. And less. In the high school classroom you are a drill sergeant, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother - father - brother - sister - uncle - aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.

In the teachers’ cafeteria veterans warned me, Son, tell ’em nothing about yourself. They’re kids, goddam it. You’re the teacher. You have a right to privacy. You know the game, don’t you? The little buggers are diabolical. They are not, repeat not, your natural friends. They can smell it when you’re going to teach a real lesson on grammar or something, and they’ll head you off at the pass, baby. Watch ’em. Those kids have been at this for years, eleven or twelve, and they have teachers all figured out. They’ll know if you’re even thinking about grammar or spelling, and they’ll raise their little hands and put on that interested expression and ask you what games you played as a kid or who do you like for the goddam World Series. Oh, yeah. And you’ll fall for it. Next thing is you’re spilling your guts and they go home not knowing one end of a sentence from the other, but telling the moms and dads about your life. Not that they care. They’ll get by, but where does that leave you? You can never get back the bits and pieces of your life that stick in their little heads. Your life, man. It’s all you have. Tell ’em nothing.

The advice was wasted. I learned through trial and error and paid a price for it. I had to find my own way of being a man and a teacher and that is what I struggled with for thirty years in and out of the classrooms of New York. 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.

My life saved my life. On my second day at McKee a boy asks a question that sends me into the past and colors the way I teach for the next thirty years. I am nudged into the past, the materials of my life.

Joey Santos calls out, Yo, teach….

You are not to call out. You are to raise your hand.

Yeah, yeah, said Joey, but…

They have a way of saying yeah yeah that tells you they’re barely tolerating you. In the yeah yeah they’re saying, We’re trying to be patient, man, giving you a break because you’re just a new teacher.

Joey raises his hand. Yo, teacher man….

Call me Mr. McCourt.

Yeah. OK. So, you Scotch or somethin’?

Joey is the mouth. There’s one in every class along with the complainer, the clown, the goody-goody, the beauty queen, the volunteer for everything, the jock, the intellectual, the momma’s boy, the mystic, the sissy, the lover, the critic, the jerk, the religious fanatic who sees sin everywhere, the brooding one who sits in the back staring at the desk, the happy one, the saint who finds good in all creatures. It’s the job of the mouth to ask questions, anything to keep the teacher from the boring lesson. I may be a new teacher but I’m on to Joey’s delaying game. It’s universal. I played the same game in Ireland. I was the mouth in my class in Leamy’s National School. The master would write an algebra question or an Irish conjugation on the board and the boys would hiss, Ask him a question, McCourt. Get him away from the bloody lesson. Go on, go on.

I’d say, Sir, did they have algebra in olden times in Ireland?

Mr. O’Halloran liked me, good boy, neat handwriting, always polite and obedient. He would put the chalk down, and from the way he sat at his desk and took his time before speaking you could see how happy he was to escape from algebra and Irish syntax. He’d say, Boys, you have every right to be proud of your ancestors. Long before the Greeks, even the Egyptians, your forefathers in this lovely land could capture the rays of the sun in the heart of winter and direct them to dark inner chambers for a few golden moments. They knew the ways of the heavenly bodies and that took them beyond algebra, beyond calculus, beyond, boys, oh, beyond beyond.

Sometimes, in the warm days of spring, he dozed off in his chair and we sat quietly, forty of us, waiting for him to wake, not even daring to leave the room if he slept past going-home time.

No. I’m not Scotch. I’m Irish.

Joey looks sincere. Oh, yeah? What’s Irish?

Irish is whatever comes out of Ireland.

Like St. Patrick, right?

Well, no, not exactly. This leads to the telling of the story of St. Patrick, which keeps us away from the b-o-r-i-n-g English lesson, which leads to other questions.

Hey, mister. Everyone talk English over there in Ireland?

What kinda sports didja play?

You all Catlics in Ireland?

Don’t let them take over the classroom. Stand up to them. Show them who’s in charge. Be firm or be dead. Take no shit. Tell them, Open your notebooks. Time for the spelling list.

Aw, teacher, aw, Gawd, aw man. Spelling. Spelling. Spelling. Do we haveta? They moan, B-o-r-i-n-g spelling list. They pretend to bang their foreheads on desks, bury their faces in their folded arms. They beg for the pass. Gotta go. Gotta go. Man, we thought you were a nice guy, young and all. Why do all these English teachers have to do the same old thing? Same old spelling lessons, same old vocabulary lessons, same old shit, excuse the language? Can’t you tell us more about Ireland?

Yo, teacher man…. Joey again. Mouth to the rescue.

Joey, I told you my name is Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt, Mr. McCourt.

Yeah, yeah. So, mister, did you go out with girls in Ireland?

No, dammit. Sheep. We went out with sheep. What do you think we went out with?

The class explodes. They laugh, clutch their chests, nudge, elbow one another, pretend to fall out of their desks. This teacher. Crazy, man. Talks funny. Goes out with sheep. Lock up your sheep.

Excuse me. Open your notebooks, please. We have a spelling list to cover.

Hysterics. Will sheep be on the list? Oh, man.

That smart-ass response was a mistake. There will be trouble. The goody-goody, the saint and the critic will surely report me: Oh, Mom, oh, Dad, oh, Mr. Principal, guess what teacher said in class today. Bad things about sheep.

I’m not prepared, trained or ready for this. It’s not teaching. It has nothing to do with English literature, grammar, writing. When will I be strong enough to walk into the room, get their immediate attention and teach? Around this school there are quiet industrious classes where teachers are in command. In the cafeteria older teachers tell me, Yeah, it takes at least five years.

Next day the principal sends for me. He sits behind his desk, talking into the telephone, smoking a cigarette. He keeps saying, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll speak to the person involved. New teacher, I’m afraid.

He puts the phone down. Sheep. What is this about sheep?

Sheep?

I dunno what I’m gonna do with you. There’s a complaint you said “dammit” in class. I know you’re just off the boat from an agricultural country and don’t know the ropes, but you should have some common sense.

No, sir. Not off the boat. I’ve been here eight and a half years, including my two years in the army, not counting years of infancy in Brooklyn.

Well, look. First the sandwich, now the sheep. Damn phone ringing off the hook. Parents up in arms. I have to cover my ass. You’re two days in the building and two days you’re in the soup. How do you do it? If you’ll excuse the expression you’re inclined to screw up a bit. Why the hell did you have to tell these kids about the sheep?

I’m sorry. They kept asking me questions, and I was exasperated. They were only trying to keep me away from the spelling list.

That’s it?

I thought the sheep thing was a bit funny at the time.

Oh, yeah, indeed. You standing there advocating bestiality. Thirteen parents are demanding you be fired. There are righteous people on Staten Island.

I was only joking.

No, young man. No jokes here. There’s a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You’re the teacher. You say you went out with sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.

I’m sorry.

This time I’ll let it go. I’ll tell the parents you’re just an Irish immigrant off the boat.

But I was born here.

Could you be quiet for one minute and listen while I save your life, huh? This time I’ll let it go. I won’t put a letter in your file. You don’t realize how serious it is to get a letter in your file. If you’ve got any ambition to rise in this system, principal, assistant principal, guidance counselor, the letter in the file will hold you back. It’s the start of the long downward slide.

Sir, I don’t want to be principal. I just want to teach.

Yeah, yeah. That’s what they all say. You’ll get over it. These kids will give you gray hair before you’re thirty.

It was clear I was not cut out to be the purposeful kind of teacher who brushed aside all questions, requests, complaints, to get on with the well-planned lesson. That would have reminded me of that school in Limerick where the lesson was king and we were nothing. I was already dreaming of a school where teachers were guides and mentors, not taskmasters. I didn’t have any particular philosophy of education except that I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study.

If a principal had ever said, The class is yours, teacher. Do with it what you like, I would have said to my students, Push the chairs aside. Sit on the floor. Go to sleep.

What?

I said, Go to sleep.

Why?

Figure it out for yourself while you’re lying there on the floor.

They’d lie on the floor and some would drift off. There would be giggling as boy wriggled closer to girl. Sleepers would snore sweetly. I’d stretch out with them on the floor and ask if anyone knew a lullaby. I know a girl would start and others would join. A boy might say, Man, what if the principal walked in. Yeah. The lullaby continues, a murmur around the room. Mr. McCourt, when are we getting up? He’s told, Shush, man, and he shushes. The bell rings and they’re slow off the floor. They leave the room, relaxed and puzzled. Please don’t ask me why I’d have such a session. It must be the spirit that moves.

I
f you were in my classes in the early McKee days you would have seen a scrawny young man in his late twenties with unruly black hair, eyes that flared with a chronic infection, bad teeth and the hangdog look you see on immigrants in Ellis Island photographs or on pickpockets being arrested.

There were reasons for the hangdog look:

I was born in New York and taken to Ireland before I was four. I had three brothers. My father, an alcoholic, wild man, great patriot, ready always to die for Ireland, abandoned us when I was ten going on eleven. A baby sister died, twin boys died, two boys were born. My mother begged for food, clothing, and coal to boil water for the tea. Neighbors told her to place us in an orphanage, me and my brothers. No, no, never. The shame of it. She hung on. We grew. My brothers and I left school at fourteen, worked, dreamed of America and, one by one, sailed away. My mother followed with the youngest, expecting to live happily ever after. That’s what you’re supposed to do in America, but she never had a moment of happy-ever-after.

In New York I worked at menial and laboring jobs till I was drafted into the United States Army. After two years in Germany I went to college on the GI Bill to become a teacher. In college there were courses on literature and composition. There were courses on how to teach by professors who did not know how to teach.

So, Mr. McCourt, what was it like growing up in, you know, Ireland?

I’m twenty-seven years old, a new teacher, dipping into my past to satisfy these American teenagers, to keep them quiet and in their seats. I never thought my past would be so useful. Why would anyone want to know about my miserable life? Then I realize this is what my father did when he told us stories by the fire. He told us about men called seanachies who traveled the country telling the hundreds of stories they carried in their heads. People would let them warm themselves by the fire, offer them a drop, feed them whatever they were having themselves, listen to hours of story and song that seemed endless, give them a blanket or a sack to cover themselves on the bed of straw in the corner. If the seanachie needed love there might be an aging daughter available.

I argue with myself, You’re telling stories and you’re supposed to be teaching.

I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

Storytelling is a waste of time.

I can’t help it. I’m not good at lecturing.

You’re a fraud. You’re cheating our children.

They don’t seem to think so.

The poor kids don’t know.

I’m a teacher in an American school telling stories of my school days in Ireland. It’s a routine that softens them up in the unlikely event I might teach something solid from the curriculum.

One day, my schoolmaster joked that I looked like something the cat brought in. The class laughed. The master smiled with his great yellow horsey teeth and gobs of phlegm stirred and rattled in his gullet. My classmates took that as a laugh, and when they laughed with him I hated them. I hated the master, too, because I knew that for days to come I’d be known in the school yard as the one the cat brought in. If the master had made that remark about another boy I would have laughed, too, because I was as great a coward as the next one, terrified of the stick.

There was one boy in the class who did not laugh with everyone else: Billy Campbell. When the class laughed, Billy would stare straight ahead and the master would stare at him, waiting for him to be like everyone else. We waited for him to drag Billy from his seat, but he never did. I think the master admired him for his independence. I admired him, too, and wished I had his courage. It never came to me.

Boys in that Irish school mocked the American accent I had from New York. You can’t go away and leave your accent behind, and when they mock your accent you don’t know what to do or think or feel till the pushing starts and you know they’re trying to get a rise out of you. It’s you against forty boys from the lanes of Limerick and you can’t run, for if you do, you’ll be known as a sissy or a nancy boy the rest of your life. They call you gangster or redskin and then you fight and fight till someone hits you on the nose and you’re pumping blood all over your one shirt, which will get you into terrible trouble with your mother, who will leave her chair by the fire and give you a good clitther on the head for fighting at all. There’s no use trying to explain to your mother that you got all this blood from defending your American accent, which you have because of her in the first place. No, she’ll say, now she has to boil water and wash your bloody shirt and see if she can dry it before the fire so that you can have it for school tomorrow. She says nothing about the American accent that got you into trouble in the first place. But it’s all right because in a few months that accent will disappear to be replaced, thank God, with a Limerick accent anyone but my father would be proud of.

Because of my father, my troubles were not over. You’d think with my perfect Limerick accent at the age of four the boys would stop tormenting me but, no, they start mimicking my father’s North of Ireland accent and saying he’s some class of a Protestant and now I have to defend him and once more it’s home to my mother with the bloody shirt and my mother yells if she has to wash this shirt one more time it will surely fall apart in her hands. The worst part was the time when she couldn’t get the shirt dry by morning and I had to wear it damp to school. When I came home my nose was stuffed and my whole body shivered with the damp again, this time from sweat. My mother was distracted and cried all over me for being mean to me and sending me to school with that damp shirt that was getting redder and redder from all the fights. She put me to bed and buried me under old overcoats and the blanket from her own bed till the shivering stopped and I drifted off to sleep listening to her downstairs talking to my father and saying it was a sad day they left Brooklyn to have the children tormented in the school yards of Limerick.

After two days in bed I returned to school in the shirt that was now a pale shade of pink. The boys said pink was a color for sissies and was I a girl?

Billy Campbell stood up to the biggest of them. Leave the Yank alone, he said.

Oh, said the big boy. Who’s goin’ to make me?

I am, said Billy, and the big boy went to the other side of the yard to play. Billy understood my problem because his father was from Dublin and sometimes the boys sneered even at that.

I told stories about Billy because he had the kind of courage I admired. Then one of my McKee students raised his hand and said it was all right to admire Billy but didn’t I stand up to a whole group over my American accent and shouldn’t I admire myself? I said no, I did only what I had to do with everyone in that Irish school pushing and taunting me, but this fifteen-year-old McKee boy insisted you have to give yourself credit, not too much because that would be bragging. I said, OK, I’d give myself credit for fighting back except that I wasn’t as brave as Billy, who would fight not for himself but for others. He owed me nothing but he still defended me and that was a kind of courage I hoped to have some day.

My students ask about my family and bits of my past drift into my head. I realize I’m making discoveries about myself and I tell this story the way my mother told a neighbor:

I was pushing the pram with Malachy in it and him a little fella barely two. Frank was walking along beside me. Outside Todd’s store on O’Connell Street a long black motorcar pulled up to the pavement and out got this rich woman all dressed up in furs and jewelry. Well, didn’t she look into the pram and didn’t she offer to buy Malachy on the spot. You can imagine what a shock that was to me, a woman wanting to buy Malachy with his golden blond hair, his pink cheeks, his lovely little pearly white teeth. He was so lovely there in the pram, and I knew parting with him would break my heart. Besides, what would my husband say if I came home and told him I sold the child? So I told the woman no and she looked so sad my heart went out to her.

When I grew older and heard her tell that story for the hundredth time, I said she should have sold Malachy and there would have been more food for the rest of us. She said, Well, I offered you but the woman wasn’t a bit interested.

Girls in the class said, Aw, gee, Mr. McCourt, your mother shouldn’t have done that to you. People shouldn’t offer to sell their children. You ain’t so ugly.

Boys in the class said, Well, he ain’t no Clark Gable. Just kiddin’, Mr. McCourt.

Mea culpa.

When I was six, the schoolmaster in Ireland told me I was a bad boy. You’re a very bad boy. He said all the boys in the class were very bad boys. He reminded us that he was using the word very, a word he would use only on special occasions like this. If we ever used that word answering a question or writing a composition he’d have our scalps. On this occasion, it was allowed. That’s how bad we were. He had never seen such a collection and wondered what was the use of teaching urchins and amadauns. Our heads were filled with American trash from the Lyric Cinema. We were to bow those heads, pound our chests and say,
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I thought it meant, I am sorry, till he wrote on the board, “
Mea culpa.
I am guilty.” He said we were born in Original Sin, which was supposed to be washed away with the waters of baptism. He said it was clear that rivers of baptismal water had been wasted on the likes of us. One look at our darting little eyes was proof of our wickedness.

He was there to prepare us for First Confession and First Communion, to save our worthless souls. He taught us Examination of Conscience. We were to look inward, to search the landscape of our souls. We were born with Original Sin, which was a nasty oozing thing marring the dazzling whiteness of our souls. Baptism restored their white perfection. But now we were older and there were the sins: sores, gashes, abscesses. We were to drag them wriggling, squirming, putrid, into God’s glorious light. Examination of Conscience, boys, followed by the
mea culpa.
Powerful laxative, boys. Cleans you out better than a dose of salts.

Every day we practiced Examination of Conscience and confessed our sins to him and the class. The master said nothing, sat at his desk, nodded, fondled the slim stick he used to keep us in a state of grace. We confessed to all the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. He would point the stick and say, Madigan, confess to us how you committed the Deadly Sin, Envy. Our favorite Deadly Sin for confessing was Gluttony, and when he pointed the stick at Paddy Clohessy and told him, Clohessy, the Gluttony, Paddy described a meal you could only dream about: pig’s head with potatoes and cabbage and mustard, no end of lemonade to wash it down, followed by ice cream and biscuits and tea with loads of milk and sugar and, if you liked, you could rest awhile and have more of the same, your mother not a bit put out by your appetite, because there was enough for everyone and more where that came from.

The master said, Clohessy, you are a poet of the palate. No one knew what palate meant till three of us went around the corner to see if the Andrew Carnegie librarian might let us look at the big dictionary near her desk. She said, What do ye want to know palate for? and when we told her that’s what Paddy Clohessy was a poet of she looked up the word and said our teacher must be losing his wits. Paddy was stubborn. He asked her what palate was and when she said it was the center of taste sensation he looked delighted with himself and made clucking noises with his tongue. He even did it going through the streets till Billy Campbell asked him to stop as it was making him hungry.

We confessed to breaking all the Ten Commandments. If you said you committed adultery or coveted your neighbor’s wife the master knew you didn’t know what you were talking about, Don’t get above yourself, boy, and moved on to the next penitent.

After First Communion we continued Examination of Conscience for the next sacrament: Confirmation. The priest said Examination of Conscience and confession would save us from hell. His name was Father White and we were interested in him because one of the boys said he never wanted to be a priest at all. His mother forced him into the priesthood. We doubted that boy, but he said he knew one of the maids at the priests’ house and she said Father White got drunk at dinner and told the other priests his only dream was to grow up and drive the bus that went from Limerick to Galway and back but his mother wouldn’t let him. It was strange to be examined by someone who became a priest because his mother made him. I wondered if the dream of the bus was in his head while he stood at the altar saying Mass. It was strange, also, to think of a priest getting drunk, because everyone knows they’re not supposed to. I used to look at buses passing by and picture him up there, smiling away and no priestly collar choking the life out of him.

When you get into the habit of examining your conscience it’s hard to stop, especially when you’re an Irish Catholic boy. If you do bad things you look into your soul, and there are the sins, festering. Everything is either a sin or not a sin and that’s an idea you might carry in your head the rest of your life. Then when you grow up and drift away from the church,
Mea culpa
is a faint whisper in your past. It’s still there, but now you’re older and not so easily frightened.

When you’re in a state of grace the soul is a pure dazzling white surface, but your sins create abscesses that ooze and stink. You try to save yourself with
Mea culpa,
the only Latin words that mean anything to you or God.

If I could travel to my twenty-seventh year, my first teaching year, I’d take me out for a steak, a baked potato, a pint of stout. I’d give myself a good talking to. For Christ’s sake, kid, straighten up. Throw back those miserable bony shoulders. Stop mumbling. Speak up. Stop putting yourself down. In that department the world will be happy to oblige. You’re starting your teaching career, and it isn’t an easy life. I know. I did it. You’d be better off as a cop. At least you’d have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth. If you don’t learn to love it, you’ll wriggle in a corner of hell.