Teacher Man

by Frank McCourt

  Yes. Come on, David. It's not pornography. We don't have all day. We have to get through dozens of recipes.

  But, Mr. McCourt, I never read a recipe in my life. I never read a cookbook in my life. I never even cooked an egg.

  Good, David. Today your palate comes to life. Today your vocabulary expands. Today you become a gourmet.

  A hand. What's a gourmet?

  Another hand. A gourmet is a person who appreciates good food and wine and the finer things in life.

  A chorus of O-o-o-hs travels around the room and there are smiles and admiring glances for James, who is the last one you'd ever expect to know anything beyond hot dogs and french fries.

  David reads a recipe for coq au vin. His voice is flat and tentative but his interest seems to grow as he goes through the recipe, discovering ingredients he's never heard of.

  David, I want you and the class to note the time and date and the fact that in room 205 of Stuyvesant High School you recited to your peers the first recipe of your life. Only God knows where this will lead you. I want all of you to remember that this is probably the first time in history a class in creative writing or English sat together and read cookbook recipes. David, you will note the absence of wild applause. You read that recipe as if you were reading a page of the New York telephone directory. But don't despair. You were in virgin territory and when we return for your next reading I'm sure you'll give the recipe full value. Anyone else?

  There is a forest of hands. I call on Brian. I know it's a mistake and I know the negative comment is coming. He's another little twerp like Andrew of the Tilted Chair, but I'm the teacher rising above it, mature and ready to put my ego aside.

  Yes, Brian.

  He looks at Penny in the seat beside him. He's gay, she's lesbian. They don't hide it. They never knew a closet. He's short and fat. She's tall and thin and she holds her head as if to say, You wanna make something of it? I don't want to make something of it. Why have they joined forces against me? I know they dislike me and why can't I accept that simple fact? You can't be liked by every one of the hundreds of kids you have every year. There are teachers like Phil Fisher who don't give a damn about being liked or disliked. He'd say, I am teaching calculus, you hopeless blockheads. If you don't pay attention and if you don't study, you'll fail and if you fail you'll wind up teaching arithmetic to schizophrenics. If all the kids in the class despised him Phil would despise them in turn and pound advanced calculus into their heads till they could recite it in their sleep.

  Yes, Brian?

  Oh, he's a cool one, this Brian. There's another little smile for Penny. He's going to turn me into shish kebab. He takes his time.

  I don't know, Mr. aw McCourt, how could I go home and aw tell my parents we're sitting around in a junior class at Stuyvesant High School reading aw recipes from cookbooks? Other classes are reading aw American literature but we have to sit here reading recipes like we were aw retards.

  I feel irritated. I'd like to demolish Brian with a cutting remark, but James of the gourmet definition takes charge. Could I say something? He looks at Brian. All you ever do is sit there criticizing. Tell me this: Are you glued to your seat?

  Of course I'm not glued to my seat.

  Do you know where the program office is?

  Yeah.

  So, if you don't like what we do here, why don't you get your ass off that chair and go to the program office and change your class? Nobody's keeping you here. Right, Mr. McCourt? Transfer, says James. Get outta here. Go read Moby-Dick, if you're strong enough.

  Susan Gilman never raises her hand. Everything is too urgent. No use telling her calling out is against the rules. She brushes that aside. Who cares? She wants you to know she's discovered your game. I know why you want us to read these recipes out loud like this.

  You do?

  Because they look like poetry on the page and some of them read like poetry. I mean they're even better than poetry because you can taste them. And, wow, the Italian recipes are pure music.

  Maureen McSherry chimes in. The other thing I like about the recipes is you can read them the way they are without pain-in-the-ass English teachers digging for the deeper meaning.

  All right, Maureen, we'll get back to that sometime.

  What?

  The pain-in-the-ass English teachers digging for meaning.

  Michael Carr says he has his flute with him and if anyone would like to recite or sing a recipe he'll play with them. Brian looks skeptical. He says, Are you kidding? Play your flute with a recipe? Are we going crazy in this class? Susan tells him can it and offers to read a recipe for lasagna with Michael backing her up. While she reads a recipe for Swedish meatballs he plays "Hava Negila," a melody that has nothing to do with Swedish meatballs, and the class goes from giggling to serious listening to applause and congratulations. James says they should take it on the road and call themselves The Meatballs or The Recipes and offers to be their agent as he is going into accounting. When Maureen reads a recipe for Irish soda bread Michael plays "The Irish Washerwoman" to a tapping and a clacking around the room.

  The class is alive. They tell one another this is wild, the very idea of reading recipes, reciting recipes, singing recipes with Michael adjusting his flute to French, English, Spanish, Jewish, Irish, Chinese recipes. What if someone walked in? Those Japanese educators who come and stand in the back of the room and watch teachers teach. How would the principal explain Susan and Michael and the Meatball Concerto?

  Brian casts a damper on the proceedings. He asks if he can have a pass to the program office to see if he can get a transfer on account of how he is learning nothing in this class. I mean, if the taxpayers heard how we were wasting our high school years chanting recipes you'd be out of a job, Mr. McCourt. Nothing personal, he says.

  He turns to Penny for support but she's rehearsing a paella recipe from another student's cookbook. She shakes her head at Brian and when she's finished with the recipe tells him if he leaves this class he's crazy. Crazy. Her mother has a recipe for lamb stew that is out of this world and when Penny brings it in tomorrow she'd like Michael to be prepared with his flute. Oh, if she could bring her mother to class. Her mother always sings when she makes that lamb stew in the kitchen and wouldn't it be something if Penny could just read out that recipe with her mother singing and Michael playing that beautiful flute. Wouldn't that be something!

  Brian blushes and says he plays the oboe and would love to play with Michael when Penny does her lamb-stew recipe tomorrow. She puts her hand on his arm and says, Yeah, we'll do it tomorrow.

  On the A train to Brooklyn I feel uneasy over the direction this class is taking, especially since my other classes are asking why can't they go to the park with all kinds of food and why can't they have recipe readings with music? How can all this be justified to the authorities who keep an eye on the curriculum?

  Mr. McCourt, what the hell is going on in this room? You've got these kids reading cookbooks, for Christ's sakes. And singing recipes? Are you kidding us? Could you kindly explain what this has to do with the teaching of English? Where are your lessons on literature, English or American or anything else? These kids, as you know very well, are preparing for the best colleges in the country and is this how you want to send them into the world? Reading recipes? Chanting recipes? Singing recipes? How about choreographing Irish stew or the classic Western omelet, with appropriate music, of course? Why not forget English and college preparation altogether and turn the classroom into a kitchen with demonstration lessons on cooking? Why don't we create a Stuyvesant High School Recipe Chorus and give concerts around town and internationally to benefit these kids who wasted their time in your class, McCourt, and didn't get into college and now flip dough in pizza joints or wash dishes in second-rate French bistros uptown? That's what it's going to come to. These kids might be able to sing a recipe for pate de something or other but they'll never sit in Ivy League classrooms.

  It's too late. I can't walk in tomorrow and tel
l them it's all over, forget the cookbooks, no more recipes. Put your flute away, Michael. Silence your mother, Penny. Sorry about the oboe, Brian.

  Except for Brian's little moment of rebellion, hadn't we had three days of complete class participation? And, most of all, teacher man, didn't you enjoy yourself?

  Or were you just a bloody fool, allowing yourself once again to be diverted from Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald in junior classes and Wordsworth and Coleridge in senior classes? Shouldn't you insist they bring textbooks daily so they can go a-dipping and a-hunting for deeper meanings?

  Yes, yes, but not now, not now.

  Are the kids on to you? Playing you along with the recipes and the music? Mea culpa time. Are you, under it all, a fraud? Playing along with the way they're playing you along? You can imagine what they're saying in the teachers' lounge: The Irishman has his classes completely duped. All they do is -- man, you won't believe this -- all they do is read cookbooks. Yeah. Forget Milton and Swift and Hawthorne and Melville. F'Christ's sakes, they're reading the Joy of Cooking and Fanny Farmer and Betty Crocker and singing recipes. Jesus! You can hardly hear yourself down the hall with the din of oboes and flutes and chanted recipes coming from his goddam room. Who does he think he's fooling?

  Maybe you could find a way of enjoying yourself less. You were always ingenious at making yourself miserable and you don't want to lose the touch. Maybe you could try again to teach diagramming or grub for deeper meanings? You could inflict Beowulf and the Chronicles on your suffering adolescents. What about your grand program of self-improvement, Mr. Polymath? Look at your life outside the school. You belong nowhere. Periphery man. You have no wife, and a child you rarely see. No vision, no plan, no goal. Just amble to the crypt, man. Fade and leave no legacy but memories of a man who turned his classroom into a playground, a rap session and a group-therapy forum.

  Why not? What the hell. What are schools for anyway? I ask you, is it the task of the teacher to supply canon fodder for the military-industrial complex? Are we shaping packages for the corporate assembly line?

  Ooh, aren't we getting solemn, and where did I leave my soapbox?

  Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens. Let there be no caterwauling. Sing no sad songs for me. No weeping at the bar.

  I am called before the court, accused of leading a double life. To wit: that in the classroom I enjoy myself and deny my students a proper education while I toss nightly on my celibate cot and wonder, God help us, what it's all about.

  I must congratulate myself, in passing, for never having lost the ability to examine my conscience, never having lost the gift of finding myself wanting and defective. Why fear the criticism of others when you, yourself, are first out of the critical gate? If self-denigration is the race I am the winner, even before the starting gun. Collect the bets.

  Fear? That's it, Francis. The little slum boy still fears loss of job. Fears he'll be cast into the outer darkness and deafened by the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing. Brave, imaginative teacher encourages teenagers to sing recipes but wonders when the axe will fall, when Japanese visitors will shake their heads and report him to Washington. Japanese visitors will instantly detect in my classroom signs of America's degeneracy and wonder how they could have lost the war.

  And if the axe falls?

  A pox on the axe.

  Friday the agenda was packed. In the room four guitarists plucked at strings, the new cooperative Brian practiced his oboe, Michael trilled on his flute, Zach rapped out culinary themes on the small bongo drums between his knees, two boys played harmonicas. Susan Gilman stood ready to monopolize the period with a recipe that ran for multiple columns, required forty-seven different steps and called for ingredients not seen in the average American household. She said it was pure poetry and Michael was so excited he was ready to compose a piece for woodwind, strings, bongo drums and Susan's voice. Pam is gonna do a Peking duck recipe in Cantonese and her brother from another class is playing this strange-looking instrument no one in this class ever saw before.

  I try to inject a little teaching. I say, If you're an observant writer you'll recognize the significance of this event. For the first time in history a Chinese recipe is to be read with background music. You have to be alert to historic moments. The writer is always saying, What's going on here? Always. You can bet your last dime that nowhere in history, Chinese or otherwise, will you find a moment like this.

  I attend to the historic event. Write the items on the blackboard. We'll start with Pam and her duck, then Leslie with English trifle, Larry with eggs Benedict, Vicky with stuffed pork chops.

  Guitars, oboes, flutes, harmonicas, bongo drums are warming up. Readers are silently rehearsing recipes.

  Shy Pam nods to her brother and the Peking duck recital begins. It's a long recipe, with Pam singing in a high wail and her brother plucking the strings of his instrument, so long a recipe that the other musicians begin to join in, one at a time, and by the time Pam has finished reading, the instruments are in full ensemble challenging Pam to octaves so high and rhythms so urgent that Assistant Principal Murray Kahn rushes from his office fearing the worst and when he looks through the window and sees this performance in progress he can't resist coming in, his eyes wider than wide, till Pam's voice grows softer and softer, the musicians fade, and the duck is done.

  At the end, class critics suggested Pam should have performed last. They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic. Also, they said, words and music were often mismatched. It was a big mistake using bongo drums to back English trifle. You need the delicacy and sensitivity of the violin or maybe the harpsichord and it really puzzled them that anyone would link bongos and English trifle. And speaking of violins, Michael was just perfect backing the eggs Benedict reading, and they really dug the bongo-and-harmonica combination for stuffed pork chops. There was something about pork chops that demanded the harmonica and it was amazing now how you could think of a food and an instrument to go with it. Man, this experience called for a new kind of thinking. They said kids in other classes wished they could read recipes instead of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. Other English teachers were teaching solid stuff, analyzing poetry, assigning research papers and giving lessons on the correct use of footnotes and bibliography.

  Thinking of those other English teachers and the solid stuff makes me uneasy again. They're following the curriculum, preparing the kids for higher education and the great world beyond. We're not here to enjoy ourselves, teacher man.

  This is Stuyvesant High School, the jewel in the crown of the New York educational system. These kids are the brightest of the bright. In a year they'll be sitting at the feet of distinguished professors at the best universities in the country. They'll be taking notes, copying words that will require looking up. No farting around with cookbooks and visits to the park. There will be direction and focus and serious scholarship and whatever became of that teacher we had back in Stuyvesant, you know the one.

  14

  On Monday I'll make the announcement. There will be groans and muted catcalls and whispered comments about my mother but I have to get back on track like all those other conscientious teachers. I will remind my students that the mission of this school is to prepare them for the best colleges and universities so that they can graduate someday and make solid contributions to the welfare and progress of this country, for if this country falters and fails what hope is there for the rest of the world? You bear a heavy responsibility as you go forth and it would be criminal of me, the teacher, to waste your young lives with the reading of recipes no matter how much you enjoy the activity.

  I know we're all having a good time reading recipes with background music but that is not why we were put on earth. We have to move on. That is the American way.

  Mr. McCourt, why shouldn't we read recipes? Isn't a recipe for meat loaf as important as these poe
ms that no one can understand anyway? Isn't it? You can live without poetry but you can't live without food.

  I tried to balance Walt Whitman and Robert Frost with meat loaf and recipes in general but rambled into a mumble.

  They groan again when I announce I am going to recite my favorite poem. That pisses me off and I tell them, You are pissing me off. A shocked silence. Teacher using bad language. Never mind. Recite the poem.

  Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep

  And doesn't know where to find them.

  Leave them alone and they will come home

  Wagging their tails behind them.

  Hey, what's going on here? That's not a poem. This is high school and he's giving us Mother Goose? Is he pulling our leg? Playing little games with us?

  I recite the poem again and encourage them to waste no time in digging for the deeper meaning.

  Aw, come on. Is this a joke? Man, this is high school.

  On the surface the poem, or nursery rhyme, seems simple, a plain story of a little girl who has lost her sheep, but are you listening? This is significant. She has learned to leave them alone. Bo Peep is cool. She trusts her sheep. She doesn't go bothering them as they nibble away in pasture, glen, vale and hillside. They need their grass, their roughage, and the occasional draught of water from a tinkling mountain stream. Also, they have little lambs who need time for bonding with their mothers after they've frolicked all day with their peers. They don't need the world barging in and destroying the mood. They might be sheep, they might be lambs, they might be ewes, they might be rams, but they're entitled to a little communal happiness before they are transformed into the mutton we devour, the wool we wear.

  Aw, God, Mr. McCourt, did you have to end it like that? Why couldn't you just leave them out there, sheep and lambs, all loving and enjoying themselves? We eat them, we wear them. It's not right.

  There are vegetarians and vegans in the class who thank God right here and now they have nothing to do with exploiting these poor animals and could we get back to Bo Peep? They'd like to know if I'm trying to make some kind of point.