One of New York's most beloved crotchety old men (don't worry, Andy Rooney, we love you too) is taken to task today in "Page Six" for being a bad English teacher before he was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. "He was very self-absorbed," former student Fred Kwon said. "[James Joyce] was the only writer we read. McCourt would say we were useless, or that we were not ready to be educated. Sometimes he would stop talking for 15 minutes and he would just read the paper." Kwon said his students were also disobedient, and he "felt really bad for" McCourt. Wow – it all sounds so dramatic and unruly! Was he a teacher in the school from Lean on Me? Oh, no, wait. He taught at Stuyvesant, the best public school in the city. Right.

Great Writer, Lousy Teacher? [NYP]