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Frank Mccourt Memoir

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"The happy childhood is hardly worth your while." These words both troubled and comforted me throughout the reading because they hint at the sadness people hold onto when they are a product of an unhappy childhood and at the same time they proclaim the resiliency of those who are able to survive. Frank McCourt rose up from the despair of his childhood to create this touching memoir that really made me wonder how he survived to become a teacher and author. It also made me question how many of my students are struggling with hunger, poverty, addiction, and family strife similar to McCourt. We really do not know the burdens others carry, do we?
As I read the section, I annotated what surprised me. The first exclamation I added was on page 13, where Angela's drunken father drops her brother on his head, disabling him forever. Prior to that, Franks' father had also been said to have been dropped on his head. This blatant abuse of a healthy child, not once but twice, was shocking. In addition, the neglect of such young children throughout the section was also surprising. Playing on the playground in a New York neighborhood at the mere ages of two and three without supervision is appalling. Yet there was so much more! The constant pregnant mother, the neglect, the alcoholism, the hunger, the …show more content…

First, he assumed that I knew about the Catholic religion. Throughout the section he uses many terms familiar to Catholicism. The Feast of the Circumcision, Benediction, novenas, saints, the feast of St. Joseph, the saint of Assisi...these were just a few of the terms the author assumed I knew. He also assumed that I understood Irish history. He mentioned "the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years" (11). He also mentioned his father's role in the conflict. If I were teaching this book, I would need to make sure that students had background knowledge in both these

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