The temptation to draw broad policy lessons from Pulitzer prize-winner Frank McCourt's new memoir, Teacher Man, has been irresistible for some readers.  Newsweek's Anna Quindlen, for example, built a column around the book, arguing that “teaching's the toughest job there is.”  Newsday columnist Dennis Duggan sought out McCourt's views of New York's new teacher contract. But Teacher Man is, in the end, a memoir—not a policy manifesto.

 

The book is a series of anecdotes from McCourt's 30 years of teaching in New York City's public schools.  Because McCourt is a master storyteller, as he demonstrated in Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, these anecdotes are generally captivating, often humorous, and occasionally moving. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and McCourt's experiences provide only a limited perspective—not a guide for policy.   By trying to turn them into one, reviewers overlook the book's real value.

Approached on its own terms—as a portal into one man's experiences—Teacher Man has much to offer readers interested in public education. With his trademark simple, straightforward language, McCourt excels at pulling readers into the situation.  On his first day teaching, when he must establish his authority before 34 teenagers, readers can almost smell the tension in the room. When McCourt chaperones 29 boisterous future beauticians on a theater trip, readers share his nervous dread of the girls' next move, even while choking back laughter.  For readers who have never taught in a public school, like me, McCourt's book may be as close as we can come to knowing how it feels to stand before a class of hormonally-amped high-school students.

Dozens of students appear throughout the book, some over pages, most for just a few sentences. Yet, like a skilled artist drawing a figure in impossibly few strokes, McCourt renders them all vividly in few lines. Some reviewers have complained Teacher Man lacks the in-depth characterizations of McCourt's previous books. But McCourt's sketchbook characterizations in Teacher Man are actually an appropriate reflection of his isolation as a classroom teacher.  And the most compelling students—Orthodox future farmer Bob Stein, for example, or troubled enigma Kevin Dunne—stick in the reader's head, as they surely must have McCourt's.

What really makes this book interesting, though, is McCourt's personal journey over the years he chronicles. From a lost, insecure young man, hobbled by the emotional legacy of events described in his earlier books, McCourt becomes an adult who is, while still acutely cognizant of his flaws, sufficiently at peace with himself to dare undertake the writing of Angela's Ashes, the book that would win him a Pulitzer Prize.  Teacher Man is particularly compelling—and comforting—to young people at the start of their careers, who will find much to recognize in his descriptions of feeling adrift, in over his head, and skeptical of ever finding the meaning or recognition he craves. Chill out, McCourt seems to be saying, you don't have to have all the answers now, it took me 30 years to become comfortable with myself.

McCourt's personal growth is reflected in his development as a teacher.  At the start of the book, he seems overwhelmed by his students. “Instead of teaching,” he writes, “I told stories. Anything to keep them quiet and in their seats.”  The young McCourt often comes across as defensive and defeated by the challenges his students bring to the classroom, as well as the personal demons that remain from his impoverished upbringing in Limerick, Ireland.  He lacks the sense of self-efficacy Teach for America famously seeks in applicants. McCourt knows many of the students he's teaching aren't being well-served, by him or the system. But he's just trying to get by. Later in the book, however, affirmed by his hiring at the highly-regarded Stuyvesant High School, freed by its supportive environment, and challenged to teach creative writing, McCourt begins to find his confidence in the classroom—and his life outside it.

McCourt's story, particularly the attitude of futility he frequently expresses in response to the challenges his students face, can be frustrating to readers who believe schools must do a better job of educating disadvantaged young people. But because his story reminds us what hard work improving student learning really is, it's all the more important for such readers to hear. Like it or not, McCourt's resignation to his students' poor performance echoes that of much of today's education community.  Many reviewers have praised McCourt's creativity in devising assignments, such as asking students to write excuse notes as an exercise. But is this really the most we should expect of poor and working-class high-schoolers?  Would the reviewers be happy if this were all teachers assigned their children?  

The response to this anecdote illustrates one of the hazards of trying to draw policy implications from memoir: The genre locks readers so tightly into the personal experiences and emotions of a single author that readers lose broader perspective. And the emotional landscape of Teacher Man is necessarily bounded by McCourt's own biases, insecurities, and experiences.  A reader would draw entirely different conclusions from, say, Wendy Kopp's One Day, All Children or Rafe Esquith's There Are No Shortcuts.

This is not a criticism of McCourt's book. A memoir's greatest strength is its ability to draw readers intimately into an author's interior world. That is why policymakers may be one audience for whom Teacher Man is most valuable, even though it is not a guide to policymaking.  Education policy debates are awash in a sea of cheap, false emotion and rhetoric:  Partisans on all sides sentimentalize children and demonize opponents in the service of a particular agenda. In this environment, McCourt's honest discussion of his varied feelings about his students and teaching—and the real emotional response he elicits from readers—is a breath of fresh air.