Caroline Bentley-davies

A good message, but a rather shallow one: it's nice to be reminded of the power of positive thinking, of self-belief, and keeping expectations high, but there's nothing more profound than that here. Of course the field, and the practice of teaching, can easily drag one into a mire of self-fulfilling low expectations, of railing against extrinsic issues like the social background of your learners, of being ground down by the institutional framework and paperwork. So it's good to have the occasional coherent, and mildly inspirational, reminder that your students are just as capable as you of mastering your material, and that your enthusiastic, committed work *can* get them there. So this book is worthy of half-an-hour's skimming, but only that, and is dull in layout and tone. Maybe that exemplifies the point in a contrary way: good teaching runs on charisma, and is dynamic and of the moment. We can pretty much all recognise it when it's there, but describing or unpicking it soon becomes unexciting...… (mehr)