Author Susan Jane Gilman is leaving us to guess whether, in writing her best-selling "Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress," she hadn't learned everything she knew about hypocrisy from her one-time Stuyvesant High English teacher Frank McCourt. Mr. McCourt has been all over the news lately with the release of his latest effort, "Teacher Man." Stuyvesant High graduates sometimes go on to become famous . . . witness Lucy Liu, class of 1986 . . . but teachers do so less regularly.

While making plain that a teacher's lot is an unenviable one . . . piled high with student-perpetrated garbage, forced into endless petty meetings, rewarded with crumbs . . . Frank told the New York Times that when politicians make efforts to improve education, it is like "interfering with a couple in the bedroom." Just what did he do, back in the day, with his students, anyhow?

In her Times review of "Teacher Man," Michiko Kakutani only stopped short of issuing a fatwa against the author. She opined that the bulk of the new book is a reworking of McCourt's old material and that the portions which are not nonetheless are as stale as the Pitt-Aniston romance. McCourt is not even so kind to himself; in "Teacher Man" he makes reference to his own person as a "floundering old fart." (By Scott Rose)