Excerpt from an Interview with Frank McCourt (Students' emotional needs)

 Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, is a retired English teacher

How did you balance the emotional needs of students with their intellectual ones?

These girls would come from, I had one class of 35 girls come in these white dresses, uniforms or whatever they are, with hair, hairdos, these beehive hairdos, where you could raise a sparrow in each family. They came into my class and they sat, this first day they sat down, and they took out little boxes, and they started doing their nails and plucking their eyebrows, and fixing their eyelids and so on, eyelashes, and I said what -- this was a vocational high school -- I said, "What shop is this?" "Cosmetology." I said, "What's cosmetology?" "Beauty culture." And then they'd comment on me, they'd say, "Yo teach, your hair is a mess, your nails need work. Why don't you come up to beauty culture and we'll do you?" That was an invitation I declined.

But all of this was human stuff and it had nothing to do with the curriculum. In the meantime, I'm finding my way, because nobody was there to help me. I'm finding my way through this education minefield. I'd go up to the teacher's cafeteria at lunchtime. On one side of the cafeteria the old timers were gathered -- they're giving me advice, and they're saying, traditional and conservative and they've been through it, and they say you know, "You're the boss in that classroom, you tell them what to do, don't ever tell them anything about yourself, nothing private." Then I'd go to the other side of the cafeteria, and there are the younger teachers who were progressive, you know, students of John Dewey, and they'd say, "Well, you know, these kids are people. These are real people and we have to meet their felt needs." I didn't know what a felt need was, but I guess I tried to meet their felt needs. It was a long, slow process, because there's no, there's no method or technique by which you can become a successful teacher overnight. It takes years. And it's like writing I suppose, or like any art, or any human endeavor -- you have to find your own way. You have to find your own style, techniques and style. So, I found my own style after a while, and sometimes I would imitate other teachers who had certain ways of dealing with classes. Didn't work, never worked. It's like being a writer. You imitate Faulkner, you imitate Hemingway, you imitate Scott Fitzgerald, but in the end you find your own voice, and your own style, and that's what I had to do as a teacher.