Are We There Yet?

If you want a book that bulldozes through all the nonsense, all the 'smoke and mirrors' of teaching, as presented by many of the teaching & education 'experts', then this book is for you, regardless of which subject you teach. It is simple, direct and not concerned with complicated ideologies. Each section in my book provides straight forward, honest basics on how to do the job in a no-nonsense way that produces results. I have been teaching for almost twenty years and I have seen a lot of different fads, flavours of the month, styles, ideas and theories put forth, which have then been discarded and replaced by whatever new 'radical' idea has been dreamed up by some 'expert' or another, usually preceded by a cabinet reshuffle or a change of government! But throughout that time, my own approach has remained, largely, unchanged. The ideas, principles, practices and strategies that I use now are basically the same ones that I used during my early years and I use them for two reasons: 1. Because they work! 2. Because my ideas are not entirely my own. They have been formed through watching and listening to some truly great teachers and by discussing, debating and arguing about teaching with those people, at length and then, having absorbed and learned from and been influenced by their ideas, styles, techniques and strategies, I formed a set of teaching 'basics', based on their brilliance, NOT my own, which, if followed properly and whole-heartedly, produce success. It's what all successful people, in every aspect of life, do. They learn from others by observing, analysing, questioning, discussing, debating and arguing and then, they make a decision about which aspects of what those people do can be incorporated into their own way of working. I am very fortunate to have known an internationally renowned surgeon who, when I talked with him about how he came to be so good at what he does, described that last paragraph to me. He did all of those things as part of his own process to work out what he already did that was excellent and which aspects of other surgeon's practices and procedures he could learn from and incorporate into his own way of performing surgery, in order to become the best surgeon he could possibly be. The result was a surgeon who other surgeons stated was the only person they would trust with their own lives. A man whom I trusted with my lovely wife's life when she needed a miracle. And I have tried to model my own development, as a teacher, on that same model. Prior to being a teacher I had an extremely successful sales management career and I have brought some principles of selling and successful sales management into my teaching career, for the simple fact that there is a lot of overlap between selling, sales management and teaching. In the world of sales and sales management, we worked on a basic premise that 'Telling isn't selling' and the same is true of teaching; Telling isn't teaching! Once I became a teacher, I quickly learned that teaching the world's most hated subject, Maths, was exactly like selling. No one was going to 'buy' maths just because I told them to or just because I said it was good for them or because I said that they needed it for a better life! So, as a teacher, I had to work in exactly the same way that I had worked throughout my sales and sales management career: I needed to use a variety of skills and techniques that would help my customers, my pupils, actually WANT to buy Maths. And I would like to think that I have achieved that through the methods, techniques and strategies that I describe in this book.