What is a successful teacher?

McCourt explains about how he feels that he wasn’t a good teacher until he left the urban setting and into a calmer suburban classroom. Maybe McCourt’s definition of a successful teacher is taking a class and that has failed in every way to learn and be successful and turning it all the way into one that would fit the definition of a perfect classroom, like the one you see in movies or in classroom model posters. I feel that success can be measured in different ways than just taking your end result and comparing it to the “right answers”. I want to take McCourt’s career and analyze it to see how successful his impact was on his classes.

I want to compare McCourt to some professional baseball/football managers. I feel that a teacher is very similar to a head coach or manager in professional sports because it is up to them to make executive decisions, run practices/class meetings, come up with a plan for success and ultimately take responsibility for the brunt or success as a direct reflection of themselves. I feel that there is no one definition for what a successful teacher is just as there is none for a head coach/manager. I would like to make 2 distinct classifications of teachers: builders and finishers. In sports, certain coach’s success are measured on how they took a laughing stock of a ballclub and turned them into a playoff potential team. Other coach’s are known for taking a team that has potential but seems to be at a dead end in success and cant can’t seem to convert their talent to the next level of winning a championship, into winning one. Both coaches are considered to be just as successful in the giant leaps they progress a club forward. Teaching, in my opinion, is the same! McCourt realized that when he was in an urban setting early on in his career he was not able to take that extreme setting and turn it into gold. I will say that he could be considered to be a good builder in the fact that he earned the respect of his students through perseverance of the stunts they tried to pull on him and never had any intentions of writing anybody up. He positively impacted that setting and might have very well set that class up for success for the next teacher who replaces him. It wasn’t until later in his career when he left the urban setting until he called himself successful. I believe that in this situation he was dealt a decent hand of students and he turned that hand into a royal flush.

McCourt considered himself to be more of a finisher of a teacher and as a result wrote off his early years as a failure when it absolutely was not. He played two different roles in both settings and I feel that he was just as successful in the first as he was in the later.