This first chapter of Part 3 explains how McCourt’s itinerant teaching career finally comes together and he finds a bit more stability. A year after returning from Dublin, he gets a job at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, a college preparatory school. He first fills in for someone on leave and then takes a full-time position. He plans to stay only two years and then quit teaching, but that changes after the birth of his daughter Maggie. His domestic duties bring some order to his life, and he settles into a routine, feeling more content with his circumstances.

Roger Goodman, the assistant principal and head of the English Department at Stuyvesant, is different from the other administrators McCourt had previously met: trusting, supportive, and without arrogance. They drink together and Roger thinks McCourt is a great teacher, asking what McCourt wants to teach and letting him browse the department’s vast supply of English books. Although McCourt feels more confident in his career, teaching is still a challenge in many ways. He explains how time-consuming the work is, giving as an example what it’s like to grade five classes’ worth of papers: “If you gave each paper a bare five minutes you’d spend, on this one set of papers, fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes.