It's your time you're wasting: a teacher's tale of classroom hell, by Frank Chalk

This book by Frank Chalk is at one and the same time both excruciating and hilarious. Anyone who has ever taught in a "challenging" secondary school will recognize immediately the stereotypical students, teachers and senior management portrayed here.

The chapter on the ICT suite is a case in point:

"The work done in the IT suite looks, to a non-expert outsider like myself, like a mixture of typing and that exercise you used to do aged six, in junior school; the one where you would cut pictures out of magazines and stick them on a large piece of coloured paper to make a collage. Cutting and pasting, we used to call it. Nowadays it is still called cutting and pasting but it is much easier: there’s no messy glue to worry about, and the participants are all 15-years-old. What progress we have made!"

Similarly, the author accurately describes the sort of INSET training day that teachers everywhere have come to dread: the parachuting in of a so-called expert who has nothing interesting or relevant to say, but wastes a lot of time in the process.

This book is a full-length version of a staffroom cynic's hilarious diatribe. Buy it.

It's Your Time You're Wasting: A Teacher's Tales of Classroom Hell (Frank Chalk Book 1)

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