Frank McCourt: Inspirational Writer, AFT Member
 |
|
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York City teacher Frank McCourt, 78, who died July 19, was one of the world’s “most inspirational writers and teachers,” says AFT President Randi Weingarten.
Frank McCourt saw teaching, storytelling and writing not only as a way out of his unimaginable, poverty-stricken childhood and adolescence, but also as a way to share his life’s lessons.
McCourt, an AFT member, taught social studies and English in the city’s public schools from 1960 to 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 memoir, Angela’s Ashes, that detailed his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. His 2005 book, Teacher Man, chronicles his teaching career in New York City. Says Weingarten:
Thousands of students benefited from his remarkable ability to help them realize the richness of their own lives, no matter how difficult.
In 1997, McCourt spoke at an AFT conference. McCourt told the educators he knew nothing about teaching when he became a teacher, except what he had picked up from his teachers in Ireland, all “trained by the Marquis de Sade.”
I didn’t know I was learning on the job that first year and later found out I had been learning on the job for 27 years….Norman Mailer said the only way you learn something is by writing about it. The only way I learned anything was by teaching about it.
