Teacher Man, Frank McCourt. Harper Collins, 2005. ISBN: 0007173989, RRP $49.95 Nothing can prepare you for your first day of teaching. Stepping into a room filled with teenage bodies, each staring at you, waiting for you to take the lead for the year, is an unforgettable experience. Unlike most jobs, you can’t go to your boss and ask for help. No one can step you through it, as your class is exactly that, your class, whether you have the experience of 30 years or 30 seconds. You either tough it out or you don’t. Sink or swim. Thankfully for us, Frank McCourt spent 30 years treading water in the tumultuous waves of the New York City public schools system, paddling through its extremes of trade schools and select entry college feeders. The result is an engaging and lively read that chronicles this experience. McCourt is undoubtedly a brilliant storyteller; he alternates voices, from his own quasi-Irish accent, stubbornly persisting through years of exile, to the distinctively ‘Noo Yawk’ inflections of his students, who provide the semi-tautological title of the book. Left unsaid, but forever lurking on the margins of the pages, is the fact that McCourt’s teaching was both a source of material and a site for training in the art of story telling. McCourt freely admits to bluffing his way through countless hours of class time by telling his students stories. He devotes large chunks of the book to endearingly rambling digressions. McCourt celebrates this narrative mode of teaching, opposing it to the transmission of required knowledge of grammar, spelling and paragraph structure. He treats the reader to many anecdotes about growing up in poverty-stricken Limerick, sailing to New York at 19 with one new suit, a cardboard suitcase and a copy of Shakespeare (bought in the hope of impressing a girl, any girl), working on the New York docks. He ends up on a GI Bill sponsored teaching course at New York University, despite the absence of a high school diploma (a beautiful irony over which McCourt gracefully steps). Although we have met some of the material and style in his earlier books Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis, these stories are engaging enough to satisfy the reader. He provides the necessary backdrop to landing in a profession which he had no intention of making into a career. Nevertheless, he continued in it for thirty years. McCourt displays a chip