Book Review: John Owens’ Confessions a Bad Teacher
I teach. I blog. I speak publicly. I advocate. I advise. I counsel.
Not much time left for reading for pleasure.
However, from the very opening paragraphs of John Owens’ firsthand account of the contemporary, reform-beaten American classroom, Confessions of a Bad Teacher, I was hooked:
After we read the section of Homer’s The Odyssey where Odysseus and his men confront the Cyclops, we watched a movie clip of how the clever Greek hero blinded that wine-swilling, man-eating, one-eyed monster and escaped. We discussed the story for a while, and then I asked my eighth-grade class to break up into groups and write down various plot points. After about ten minutes, we reviewed the points out loud.
The kids loved the blood, bellowing, running around, and sailing away. But there was a lot of confusion about who was who and what was going on. In other words, a lot of the students were having a tough time figuring out the story. So I set to work helping them figure it out. After all, its hard to understand the significance of a story if you don’t understand the story itself.
The assistant principal, who was observing the class, later scolded me for the lesson’s “lack of academic rigor.”…
I could immediately identify with the reform-promoted, administrative disconnect between the classroom realities (and the teacher’s use of his or her own critical thinking and experience on how best to promote learning by identifying where