This past Christmas, daughter Jessica gave me a copy of Frank McCourt's memoir, "Teacher Man," the third part of his history of coming to America and finding long-term work as a high school English teacher in New York City. I'd admired and enjoyed "Angela's Ashes" (Pulitzer Prize) and "Tis" the first two parts of his work, and fully expected to enjoy, as a former college English teacher myself here at Cottey College for three decades, the confessions of a man who had faced perhaps similar challenges and rewards in the classroom, and for roughly the same length of time. Now officially retired and living comfortably on the proceeds of his first best-seller, he wouldn't need to pull his punches. And although he hadn't pursued the Ph.D. degree and had been thus limited to teaching high school, and I, by contrast, had earned the Ph.D., and had been thus free to teach on a college level, I've always figured teaching is pretty much teaching, regardless of the youngsters' ages.

Why does one enter the ranks of teachers, anyway? It's one of the few professions one can inadvertently drift into, I think. From seventh grade, when I read Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath" and Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel," I knew I wanted to enter a profession that would allow me to read novels like those and write about them. Medicine, law, advertising, sales? I'd be bored by what I thought the dryness of those first two professions, and distrusted the last two professions, that depended on your being able to sell people something. Yes, read and write, read and write, read and write, that's what I wanted to do with my working life. And I didn't want to teach high school, where kids absolutely had to take and pass the English courses I'd be teaching. It would be like teaching prisoners, but with this difference: prisoners chose to take the courses I'd be teaching. High school students had to.

America's poet laureate Billy Collins has written, "'Teacher Man' is a cry from the barricades of public education," written by a man who has "exchanged one garden of suffering for another."

Why did Frank McCourt enter teaching? When he first immigrated from Ireland to the United States, he worked on the New York docks for a living. And it was a hard life, a purely physical life, with no nourishment for the soul. That kind of life eventually wears you down. There were very few joyful days. To escape it, he took a BA degree and, with that minimal credential, was hired on as a teacher at McKee Vocational and Technical High School in Staten Island. As a novice high school teacher, of course, he had to take the dreaded "ed" classes that proceeded according to rigid, ancient formulas and rules. Even in an English class, there was no room for spontaneity.

By the time I entered a freshman English classroom, I'd absorbed as many "rules of good teaching" as McCourt evidently had, but I let them slide off my back (Cottey's mascot, after all, is the duck). My first class and I were all freshmen together, and I felt I could approach them fairly and democratically, without, that is, giving away any of my authority. Was that a contradiction of terms?

On my first day in class, I told my freshman students that I would work them hard that semester, that they'd be expected to turn in a 1,000-word essay every other week, but that I'd put in an hour for every single hour each of them invested in her essay. I told them I wanted not only a "correct" essay, but a "thoughtful" essay. They'd be graded on logic, supporting evidence, style (as soon as we discussed what that was), and that I'd be available in my academic office any time I could make it free.

Frank McCourt taught the standard three-paragraph freshman English essay for 30 years. In his memoir about those years, I think I can read between the lines and see his learned expectations of his students. They were, on the whole, pretty nice kids, and some of them deserved to be taught, but most of them were dumb as a box of blocks, and could rarely turn in a decent essay. In addition, he early suspected he'd be sacrificing his own life to those of his students. He knew they didn't care about learning English.

"The work of thousands -- thousands -- of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and woman, 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. Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You're with them, day in and day out, and you'll never know what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac."

Among beginning teachers, this has got to be a common worry, and it's a very foolish beginning teacher, indeed, who neglects to consider it. A teacher has to designate certain hours as "adult time," when he shifts from adolescent time and behavior to adult time and behavior. Here's a confidence I choose to share with you: Shortly after we moved from New York to St. Paul, when Jessica was only a few months old, and I was immersed in my freshman English classes, at the dinner table one evening, Ginny's eyes filled with tears, and she told me, "All day I have no one to talk to but this infant, and then when you come home, you immediately settle down to grade freshman themes. What am I going to do? Well, as I recall it (and I have no doubt that Ginny will correct me on this), we established certain hours in which the two of us would discuss adult matters, before opening it up to the kid. I believe all teachers need these sacrosanct hours, to keep sane.

From the vantage point of my 65 years, I realize at Cottey I was blessed with classes of bright and motivated 18-year-old girls. Most of them could see how a gracious and forceful written English would help them in social situations and would help advance them on the job. Until the last couple of years of teaching the required two-semester English Composition sequence, I tried to treat nothing as habit. And I think my students responded by submitting to me their best genuine efforts, in the composition course and the American literature sequence.

"Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, 30 years of it, Mac, gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, read and correct." I don't think I was ever reduced to that much despair.

But then, as if standing back from his chosen profession and taking an impartial look at it, he remarried and secured a position teaching English and American literature at Stuyvesant High, the flagship school in the city's education system. It seemed to make all the difference. Rays of optimism shone through the former gloom, and he decided for himself what it was important for kids that age to know. Perhaps resisting the common wisdom and standard methodology, and even the expectations and desires of his own teenage students, he chose his own way to teach and settled in for the long haul -- 30 years in the high school classroom.

"Adolescents don't always want to be set afloat on seas of speculation and uncertainty. It satisfies them to know that Tirana is the capital of Albania. They don't like it when Mr. McCourt (or Dr. Nash) says, "Why was Hamlet mean to his mother, or why didn't he kill the king when he had the chance?"

But no, just once, you wish teacher had the answer to something. But no, he threw everything back at the class. At Stuyvesant I decided to admit it when I didn't have answers. I just don't know, friends."

Funny, but after 30-odd years of teaching the interpretation of literature, I think that last decision of McCourt's might have marked his arrival at the door to pedagogic wisdom.

I heartily recommend Frank McCourt's "Teacher Man" if you want to know how teachers are made and develop. For, after all, whether your title is Mr., Ms., or Doctor, as a teacher of teenagers you're going over the same ground -- and facing the same challenges and rewards as teachers have done since the school house was a little red structure just down the road.