No Small Fry
When the going gets tough, this teacher goes to the Comic Strip Live Theater. Jack Freiberger’s new solo show, They Call Me Mister Fry, is a love letter to teachers, based on the true story of his first year as a 5th-grade teacher in South Central Los Angeles. Written by and starring Freiberger, this work combines the optimism of Patch Adams with the gritty reality of an inner-city classroom. Read more
Finally: McCourt HS
Before literary legend and longtime New York City public school teacher Frank McCourt died this past summer, efforts were underway to create a school in his honor. Now that plan has become a reality. On Oct. 6, the Department of Education announced that the Frank McCourt High School will open in fall 2010 as part of the Brandeis campus, on West 84th Street.
The small, selective school will eventually serve 432 students when all high school grades are added during the 2013-14 school year. McCourt was best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, but he also taught for 29 years, mostly at Stuyvesant High School. Read more
Frank McCourt, 1930-2009
Readers of this newspaper have come to know Frank McCourt in a different way over the past several years. As someone who thought there were too many unsung heroes in the classroom, McCourt was kind enough to play host to Manhattan Media’s annual Blackboard Awards, affairs honoring New York City’s top schools and teachers. Audiences marveled at the chance to see this expert storyteller who had a penchant for sticking it to the powers that be, including boneheaded administrators, media outlets in search of the next salacious story and politicians who liked to tell teachers how to do their jobs, a perennial target of his scorn. Read more
A Frank Memoir
“When I look back on our teaching days I wonder how we managed to survive at all. It was of course, a miserable career: the happy career is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable teaching career is the miserable high school teaching career, and worse yet is the miserable New York public high school teaching career.”
This is how I’d imagine a Frank McCourt memoir about our teaching days together at Stuyvesant High School might begin. Read more
