The virtue of recalcitrance

This evening I went to the university to hear Frank McCourt discourse on teachers. Yes, he's the one who wrote Teacher Man after publishing a couple of other memoirs (Angela's Ashes and 'Tis) and receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. In anticipation of tonight's lecture, I re-read parts of Angela's Ashes (mostly featuring his mother) and Teacher Man (about his thirty years as a high school English teacher in the New York public schools). So, knowing his writings, part of what I was doing this evening was collecting some of the words rolling off his Irish tongue.

One especially nice word I collected was recalcitrant, as in recalcitrant and obdurate teachers. It seems that McCourt's very first principal gave him a hard time on his very first day as a teacher, which, he says, was also the first day he had ever been inside a high school classroom. He expected R-E-S-P-E-C-T, respect, like what he knew from the Irish schools he attended. What a surprise!

Imagine, he said, a surgeon whose first time inside an operating room was when he walked in to do surgery on someone. That's what it was like for him, going into a New York City classroom. Immediately, there was an argument between two students and a sandwich thrown across the classroom. What's the new teacher supposed to do? Four years of training, he told us, and not a single professor had lectured on how to control sandwich fights. What should he say? His first word as a teacher was "Hey!" You can read about the episode in Teacher Man, but I'll tell you the outcome: McCourt looked at the sandwich, picked it up ... and ate it. The principal peeked in just at that time and called him into the hallway to tell him that eating lunch in front of the students didn't look good. Already on his first day as a teacher, he was being threatened by the dreaded letter that could be put in his file.

And he told us about his students. "Hey, teach!" says The Mouth, the one found in every class, the one whose job it is to ask questions to get the teacher off the subject and/or "to promote the fight that would kill time." Yeah, I remember that kid. Had one in my classes, too. Frank McCourt's advice to aspiring teachers: "Be firm or be dead!"

My opinion of Frank McCourt as teacher, formed entirely through his own words written in books and spoken tonight, is that he was a recalcitrant teacher. Most people who use the word recalcitrant probably intend to condemn the person, but I mean it in the best possible way.

1. McCourt resisted being controlled by authority figures.
2. He was not obedient and compliant.
3. And therefore, in the opinion of principals, he was probably hard to manage.

Sometimes it's important to resist authority, to be noncompliant, to be hard to manage ... if that means NOT acting like a sheep and following lock-step whatever you are told to do. It seems to me that, by definition, a teacher of creative writing must be creative. McCourt was.

Once his principal demanded to know what was going on in Frank's classroom ... where one student was playing a bongo drum, another making music on her flute, and a third reciting a recipe to the beat. "Recipes!" McCourt answered. If asked how that would fit a lesson plan or in any way be relevant, his answer would have been "Vocabulary!" The students were learning new words from the ingredients and cooking instructions found in the recipes. And the students were paying attention because it was all done as rap.

From what he said (and failed to say) tonight about No Child Left Behind, I can only wonder how McCourt's recalcitrance might show itself now ... if he weren't already retired from teaching.