McCourt devoted much of his speech to the hard-won lessons of his thirty-year teaching career in New York City public high schools. He confessed that when he first entered the classroom, he carried the pomposity he had absorbed as a college student at NYU, where professors of education taught theory but would 'run a mile' if they saw an actual teenager. The breakthrough came when McCourt realized he knew nothing—and that his students knew it too. Rather than pretending to be an authority, he had to learn to be authentic, to shed the mask that teachers instinctively put on to maintain control. This insight transformed his teaching and, eventually, his writing. It was his students who kept asking about his life in Ireland, who kept saying 'You should write a book'—and who ultimately gave him the material and the courage to write 'Angela's Ashes.'