Why Teach?

At the start of his career, Ben Newmark assumed that all the things he was told to do, from how to teach to how to record the progress of my pupils, were well planned and necessary. Sometimes things didn’t feel right and seemed bizarre but, for the first couple of years of his career, he assumed this was because he was not skilled, knowledgeable or experienced enough to understand the rationale. But he couldn’t keep this up forever. So he began to ask questions. And then he asked more. And the more he learned the more confused he became. To his horror it became clear that there wasn’t a masterplan. Instead, education was a world full of contradictory thinking, bad planning and unintended consequences. Each chapter of this book tries to answer one of the questions he struggled with, trying to explain the reasons for the oddness and then give some advice on how schools and individual teachers might manage it. And it is possible to do better than manage it. For all its frustrating weirdness there isn’t another job in the world he’d rather do. When finally he has to retire, he will be begging his closest school to teach two or three classes a week. Including chapters such as: Why are there so many spreadsheets in schools?; Why doesn’t my school behaviour system work?; Why is teaching making me so unhealthy?; and Why won’t my pupils work hard?