Dear Teachers: Please Stop Being So Difficult | Mr. Teachbad

Dear Teachers: Please Stop Being So Difficult | Mr. Teachbad:

Dear Teachers: Please Stop Being So Difficult

There is a ter­ri­ble lit­tle book called Deal­ing With Dif­fi­cult Teach­ers (2002) by Todd Whitaker. I’d been curi­ous about this book since I saw it on my assis­tant principal’s Ama­zon wish list three years ago. I finally read it this week. It was even worse than I had imag­ined, both in terms of ideas and prose.

So, let’s get started!

What do you do with a dif­fi­cult teacher?
And what is a dif­fi­cult teacher anyway?

Dif­fi­cult teach­ers are defined entirely by how the prin­ci­pal feels about what a teacher does. The prin­ci­pal, in this book, is always val­i­dated. Always.

The prin­ci­pal is pos­i­tive; the dif­fi­cult teacher is neg­a­tive.
The prin­ci­pal is try­ing to move the school for­ward; the dif­fi­cult teacher is try­ing to stop him.
Dif­fi­cult teach­ers are bad and inef­fec­tive; even dan­ger­ous.

Armed with this val­i­dat­ing and elas­tic set of truths and hints, the principal-reader is empow­ered to define dif­fi­cult