50 pages • 1 hour read
Teacher Man
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Part 3, Chapters 15-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary
Chapter 15 is about particular students McCourt taught at Stuyvesant. He starts by describing Open School Day there, which are quite different from those of the vocational schools where he had previously taught. Parents have high expectations for their children and can be demanding. There are more parents to deal with, too. Because divorce is more common among the middle class in this community, McCourt has to work with stepparents and sort out how to meet with parents who won’t be in each other’s presence.
One of his students is Bob Stein, a student who always sits in the back on a windowsill instead of at a desk. He amuses the other students—and McCourt, who laughs inwardly—with his funny banter, but he is never prepared for class. For example, he never has pen or paper even though it’s a writing class. Bob wants to be farmer when he gets older, which upsets his rabbi father. The father complains to McCourt at his Open School Day meeting that if he and his wife put Bob through college, there is no way his son is going to settle for raising pigs and corn. Observant Jews don’t eat pork, and people would talk. McCourt has no answers for him.
Six years later, he meets Bob on the street. Bob is sure that McCourt never liked him. Actually, McCourt found him funny and original, and his presence in class was refreshing. He tells Bob so, “and [Bob] was speechless and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn what people thought on Lower Broadway when they saw us in a long warm embrace, the high school teacher and the large Jewish Future Farmer of America” (240).
Next is a story about Ken, a Korean American who doesn’t get along with his parents. In particular, he hates his father, an immigrant who has high expectations for his son, wanting him to attend only Harvard or MIT for college. Ken goes to Stanford against his father’s wishes. Ken visits McCourt during the winter break of his freshman year. Ken says that in an English class at Stanford about poetry, he thought of “My Father’s Waltz” from McCourt’s class and broke down crying. The professor commiserated with him in his office, as he was an immigrant’s son too. His father was from Poland, a survivor of Auschwitz. With his professor’s help, Ken saw things in a new light and stopped hating his father.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary
The first words of this chapter are “I’m learning” (243). McCourt is nearing the end of his teaching career, and it’s taken this long to master certain things. He recounts the story of a student named Phyllis telling the class about the paper she wrote. It’s about her father dying the night the family watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. When she starts to cry, McCourt walks to her, puts his arm around her, and then embraces her fully, leading her back to her seat. It is an unforgettable moment for him.
He next sets the scene of a lesson in which he discusses writing. He tells his students that, as writers, everything they do or think is potential material. He tells them to jot everything down. They reply that their lives are boring–nothing happens. Interview your grandparents, he says; they have stories. As a result of McCourt’s urging, some students get to know their grandparents in a deeper way, learning astonishing things about them.
One of his most popular students is named David, who is Black but sits with his white friends in class. He is outgoing and funny, keeping everyone enrapt with his stories. A group of five other Black students sit in the back, apart from David, and hardly ever participate in class. One, named Clarence, declines McCourt’s invitation to read something, saying that he had nothing to say and could never be like David. McCourt pushes him, telling him to be himself, and Clarence says the only stories he has come from the street. They’re not appropriate for class and McCourt wouldn’t like them. McCourt assures him that he can speak freely, even if it means using bad language. Clarence then tells a story about a group of mothers who beat up a drug dealer haunting the neighborhood, leaving him all but dead before they call an ambulance. The other students are stunned and captivated by the story, finally erupting in applause. No one applauds more than David.
The chapter ends with the class talking about grades. Some students want more objective guidelines and are used to a more straightforward method of grading. McCourt, by contrast, is more vague in his approach. He tells them how he calculates grades, but it doesn’t involve numbers and percentages. While some see education as preparation for a career, he’s trying to give them freedom in a broader sense. As he explains to the class, “I don’t think anyone achieves complete freedom, but what I am trying to do with you is drive fear into a corner” (253).
Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary
This brief chapter is about McCourt retiring from teaching. He’s getting older and wants peace. Some days he doesn’t want to be bothered by students at all, while other days he is eager to enter the classroom and meet with them. He knows, however, that his career is reaching its end. Before he retires, he has lunch in the cafeteria with a young substitute teacher who will start a full-time job that fall. She asks if he has any advice for her, and he tells her it all comes down to this: “Find what you love and do it” (255).
He ends with the story of Guy Lind, a student who, in a freak accident, lost an eye and the use of one side of his body. In McCourt’s last class, a student named Rachel Blaustein says she doesn’t have any writing ideas because nothing bad happened to her. In essence, her life appears to be ideal, so she feels there is nothing worth writing about. Guy speaks up to say he wouldn’t change any part of what happened to him because of what it taught him and how it shaped his perspective on life.
The class ends and they say their goodbyes. As McCourt walks down the hall afterward, someone yells out, “Hey, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book” (257).
Part 3, Chapter 18 Summary
The last chapter consists of just two words: “I’ll try” (258).
Part 3, Chapters 15-18 Analysis
All three of the book’s themes come to the fore in this last set of chapters. The fact that he begins one chapter with the words “I’m learning” (243) attests to his ability to continuously learn from experience, but it is clear that McCourt has learned much already, since McCourt seems so much more comfortable in his role as a teacher. The anecdotes in this section usually have positive outcomes instead of culminating in the awkward missed opportunities that haunted the early years of his career. A case in point is in Chapter 16, when Phyllis tells the class about her father’s death, and McCourt hugs her and accompanies her to her seat, giving her effective comfort. It’s exactly the sort of confident gesture that he writes of envying other teachers for in Chapter 7.
The writing life is addressed at length in Chapter 16 as well. “Every moment of your life, you’re writing,” he tells his students (244). He doesn’t accept when they protest that their lives are boring and have no material. Everything is material; it is a matter of how someone presents it. He also tells them to mine family stories, to interview grandparents about what they did when they were young. He tells the students, “I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing” (244). The lesson comes from someone who has finally learned the truth about the “writing life” himself.
Finally, the purpose of education is illustrated by the vignettes McCourt draws of his Stuyvesant students. They experience things together, support each other, and grow as people. From a teaching standpoint, McCourt is finally able to exhibit his skills with his more self-assured approach in the classroom. He also explicitly defines his core teaching philosophy when explaining his grading method. He calls it “the Big Question: What is education, anyway?” (253). He shows them the equation he has worked out, which looks like this: F à F. It represents driving fear away so one can attain freedom. That’s his hope for his students, clearly based on his own experience in which fear ruled his life for so long. By the book’s end, McCourt appears to know how to live, teach, and now write without fear and self-doubt.
The last chapter—which are only two words in reply to a question posed at the end of the previous chapter—echoes the ending of McCourt’s first book, Angela’s Ashes. In that book, the last chapter consists only of the word “’Tis”—also a reply to the last line of the chapter before it. In ending his third and final autobiographical work with an echo of his first work, McCourt brings his trilogy full circle.
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