William F. McCarthy received a B.A. from Livingston College in Comparative Literature (Classical Greek) in 1980. He earned an M.A.T. in Secondary English from U. Mass, Dartmouth in 2007. His thesis work was on the value of discussion techniques in the literature classroom.
After college, Bill worked for eight years in scholarly publishing, the last five as Sales Manager for Yale University Press in New Haven, Ct. He began his first teaching job in 1988 as an Eighth Grade and then Language Arts teacher at the South Seventeenth Street School in the Newark, N.J. Public School System. He also worked evenings as an instructor at the Katharine Gibbs School in New York, teaching Business English and Writing. In 1992, Bill started teaching English at Southern Regional High School down the Jersey shore. He began his present assignment at MVRHS in 1998.
As a scholar and a teacher, Bill has gained greatly from his participation in the N.E.H. Summer Seminars and Institutes for Schoolteachers. Beginning in 1993 with The American Documentary Movement of the 1930s at Temple University, and continuing through Transcendentalism and American Cultural Transformation at Oregon State University in 1996, Melville and Multiculturalism at U. Mass, Dartmouth in 2001, and Dostoevsky,Tolstoy, & Solovyov at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in 2004, the experience of studying with top literary scholars and of exchanging ideas with teachers from all over the country has strongly benefited his curriculum and classroom practice.
Bill’s present teaching assignment includes one section of Sophomore English, several sections of Junior English (American Literature) and senior electives in Philosophy and Creative Writing. He is advisor to Seabreezes, our literary magazine. He also takes pleasure in reading (especially literary & cultural history) and watching films–Curtiz’s Robin Hood (1938) is his favorite. In the summer, Bill drives a taxi and pretends that he is slowly morphing into the ferryman of Hesse’s Siddhartha.