Inside Teaching by Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks

Inside Teaching intends to raise your self-awareness: How do you teach and what do you believe constitutes good teaching practice? As such this is a book for those of us with a few years under our belts. It is especially good if you feel set in your ways and need refreshing a little. This book challenges you to try out new things, and while not an ideas book, does indeed contain a lot of ideas to try.

Divided into chapters dealing with different aspects of teaching… (go to my teaching blog TEFLorama to read more)

Comprehensive guide to good teaching practice

Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener

With seventeen chapters plus two appendices and running to 430 pages, Learning Teaching is wide-ranging. It is a crucial book for new teachers, as it gives a lot of support that is useful in the first few years of work. As an experienced teacher I found parts of it to be a little redundant. Having said this, if you have a number of years under your belt, it is still worth a look as Scrivener encourages you to try to do things that you may have ignored so far. I thought it very useful for reflecting on my own practice and also for inspiring new ideas.

The good thing about Learning Teaching is that it gets you to focus on your students rather than yourself. This is an important aspect of teaching because many of us are far too concerned with what we are doing as teachers, rather than what students experience as learners. Also, shifting the focus away from the teacher makes classes both more interesting and relaxing.

Apart from this shift in emphasis it is also simply…

Go to TEFLorama to read more.

Chauvinistic History

A history of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel

First of all I’m going to make an admission, not to be confused with an apology. I have not finished this book. I cannot bring myself to waste any more of my time. I am on page 140 and I cannot face the other four hundred or so. If, after 140 pages and a forty pages preface an author has not managed to interest me in some way, then he or she never will. This is an awful book; avoid it!

As its title suggests, this book is supposed to be an overview of the history of civilizations on our planet. It was intended that it be studied by French high school students, but it is hard to see how any history teacher would have got out of his classroom alive should he have used this coma inducing rubbish.

To be fair, the book probably suffers much in translation. The prose is tough going and plods along, giving information in the least direct way. Having said this, the introduction is interesting. Braudel’s theories on how to interest children in history are worth a read. After this it is all downhill.

As the book was first published in 1963 one would expected it to be a little outdated; it certainly is this as well as Eurocentric and chauvinistic. The first two sections deal with Islam and Africa and towards both Braudel assumes the air of a benevolent school teacher, trying to encourage his students to do better. If only these two areas of the world could make some changes, then they too could come up to the level of the star pupil (the West). You can almost hear the resignation and pity in Braudel’s voice.

Braudel makes lots of statements for which he offers no supporting evidence. Byzantium was beaten from within? If that’s your opinion, fine, but don’t offer it as fact and then move onto your next point without so much as a justifying sentence.

There are many books available that claim to be an overview of the history of civilization. They all suffer from the same problem: having to cover too much ground for any person, era or place to make an impression. Braudel’s book is no exception.

If you are inclined to read a book of this type go for the similarly titled Civilizations by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Its prose has much more verve and it is more up to date.