Over the next two or three weeks I’m gong to post links to some of my books. Beginning with my, ahem, memoirs.
I loved being a classroom teacher. The energy you get from a class full of disaffected thirteen-year-olds with nothing but chaos on their mind is, well, bracing. Seriously though, it’s a great job, though spoiled somewhat by the various unworkable theories of the superannuated hippies who still manage to influence education (whilst never setting foot in the classroom).
I wrote two books about my life as a teacher, using the world’s worst pen-name. hopefully they give a flavour of my experiences and demonstrate my affection for the job and the loveable maniacs who sit behind the desks, pretending to listen as I talk.
The books are available in various places, but I’ve listed their links on Amazon, below:
A single father. No love life. And the teaching job from hell... Daniel Ken hated school, and school hated him. He left at 16 for a succession of dead-end jobs punctuated by bouts of unemployment where he'd inhabit the local library and read his way through every classic novel he could get his hands on. Motivated to reclaim his education he took short courses, a degree in English, then a Masters and then did what he swore he'd never do he returned to the classroom. To start with, things went well. But then his wife left him for his boss, and Daniel ended up bringing up his seven-year-old son, Joe, on his own, and swapping his cushy grammar school job for the teaching position no-one else would take the bottom class at the bottom 'bog standard' comprehensive in the area. But in a classroom full of ASBOs and ADD, Daniel found himself facing the sort of students he once was himself, and learning as much from them as they were from him. And in the library, where he once learnt to love books, he's about to fall in love all over again...
You can buy it here:
Eight years after the events described in the his previous book, Bog Standard, the old Technology College has been demolished and in its place is the brand new £150million William Edward Arnott Learning Village, complete with primary-colored open-plan learning areas, glossy wall-photographs of radiant children and an ‘integrated e-learning package’. Problem is, while the name may have changed, and the walls are now made of plasterboard rather than asbestos, the students are still as crazy as ever, the paperwork, exam-scams and Ofsted-obsessions have multiplied on a geometric scale, the Wunderkind Deputy Head has introduced a whole new teaching system, and the school is now run by a new generation of Stepford teachers. Daniel Ken, former blogger and committed classroom teacher finds that, if he is even to survive in this brand new teaching arena, he Must Try Harder.
You can buy it here:
I also planned to write a completely fictional third book, Bad Teacher, thus completing the trilogy that I call The Classroom Archipelago.
However, Bad Teacher will have to wait.