Master of Room 205

Read Kenneth R. Weinstein on the joy of having Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, as an English teacher:

At Stuyvesant, where he taught from 1968 to 1987, McCourt was already a larger than life figure. To begin with, though several of our teachers at Stuyvesant in the late 1970s were immigrants, McCourt was the only Irish one. (Few Irish went into teaching--the remnants of the ethnic spoils system created by the party bosses sent them to the police or fire departments.) And, true to the stereotype, McCourt had a glorious brogue and the touch of blarney. He could, with a hint of exaggeration and a twinkle in the eye, turn the most mundane of human interactions into an amusing anecdote.