....wow..... just wow.
It has been a long time since I've had that much fun reading a book, paper, article about education. A long, long time. Not since Mr. Teachbad's heyday, have I felt as much kinship with an education author.
Tom Bennett is snarky and witty. (He's also English, which I think helps in the creative insult and sarcasm departments) His bullshit detector is finely tuned; he has a brain in his head and is not afraid to use it, and he accepts nothing at face value.
What I have to admire most is Bennett's ability to translate the tortured language used in educational research writing to readable prose. I've tried many a time to read music education studies. Either I end up falling asleep or daydreaming about the surfeit awful writers and fatuous research topics. Bennett has done the legwork to disprove some of education's most entrenched fallacies: learning styles, group work, multiple intelligences, flipped classrooms, and emotional intelligence. If I had been blessed with a better memory, I would memorize large chunks of his book and recite them chapter and verse at staff meetings.
But nothing is perfect; Teacher Proof is not without flaws. The first is its title. This may be a function of the differences between American and British English. To your average American, the title sounds like something an administrator would read in order to figure out how to keep his
Along with Dan Willingham's books, Teacher Proof sits on my shelf as a must-read for every pragmatic teacher in the English-speaking world.
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