Highlights of Teaching - ESL Novel Reading :Teacher Man

Novel reading is a longstanding tradition in the ESL English teaching of the International Department, and Frank McCourt's book "Teacher Man" is a must-read autobiographical novel for every Grade 10 student.

In chapter one of “Teacher Man”, Frank McCourt tells us two major stories of his failure as a teacher during his first several years at an American vocational school, the kind of school, as he mentioned, that is considered a dumping ground for students ill-equipped for academic high schools. Not having been told how to handle classes, he made a lot of typical mistakes of a young teacher which also had led to bad consequences. The students should get the gist of the two events in Chapter 1 and find out why the students and the teacher behave in certain ways.

Through detailed and in-depth classroom interpretation by teachers, students, after understanding the story of the protagonist in the first chapter, presented the sequence of events in the form of a comic.