On being called 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 (19).On the workload of teaching:
Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands—thousands—of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P.G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You’ll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they’d find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain (32).On receiving an update regarding one of his toughest former students:
She said, this gonna kill you, Mr. McCourt, she said she gonna finish high school and go to college and teach little kids. Not big kids like us because we just a great pain but little kids that don’t talk back and she say she sorry about things she did in this class and to tell you that. Someday she gonna write you a letter.
There were fireworks in my head. It was New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July a hundred times over (146).
No comments:
Post a Comment