Stephanie Waddell- Teaching : It's Harder than it Looks

For my Collective Teacher’s Toolbox I chose to read “Teaching: It's Harder than it Looks” by Gerry Dee. This book is a hilarious recount of Mr. D’s experiences as a teacher; the good, the bad and the ugly. This wildly popular book combines mass amounts of humour with honest confessions and for that reason is a very entertaining and valuable read. “Mr. D” is also currently running TV show based off his accounts as a teacher. Dee’s premise behind writing this book was to create a guide for teaching about students, parents and other teachers based upon his experiences as a novice teacher. Most of the lessons he teaches through this book are based off the lessons that he learnt through his mistakes through his years of teaching. His book is written in the form of different stories, all which have an important lesson at the end of them. The wonderful thing about this book is that the lesson’s and the honest accounts about Dee’s experiences teaching are ones that you are not going to find in any other teacher’s handbook and along with telling you what to do in these situations he most definitely tells you what not to do as well.

Lessons from Mr. D:

Don’t try and be the teacher that everyone likes

Mr. D begins his book by saying that he started his career wanting to be that fun teacher who is everyone’s friend. He went into his first teaching gig thinking, “The kids would tell me everything; if students learned anything from me academically, it would be completely by accident” (Dee, 2012, p. 5). This was obviously an exaggeration about how he felt at the beginning of his teaching career but as he got more experience under his belt he made the realization that students have their own friends, you are not there to be another one of them. Instead of being a friend you are there to be a secondary parent to them. If you are continuously trying to adapt to what everyone else wants than you’re never really doing what you want. Though Mr. D didn’t have a spotless teaching career by any means he taught me that you have to stick to what you believe and not let other people sway what you do.

Teachers don’t lie because they want to; they lie because they have to

One of my favourite parts of the book was the section titled “Stuck with the Smart Kids.” I think every teacher has had that moment in their career when a student asks a question that you don’t know the answer to. No one knows the answers to everything but students expect that their teachers do. Often, teachers don’t want to admit that they are not almighty so they slightly fib the answer to a questions that they don’t know the answer to. Mr. D also makes it apparent that teachers make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes, but the smart kids are going to call you on your mistakes, and no one likes being called out on their mistakes. His advice was to use the smart kids to your advantage. If you aren’t sure of an answer, use the smart kids answer as an example, because that’s the best answer you are going to get out of a class. Mr. D’s teacher’s tip on dealing with smart students: “If you don’t know how to spell a word, don’t. Whatever you do, don’t write it on the board. Because you know some kid in the class is going to get too much enjoyment from your mistake. Instead, call a smart kid to the board to spell it for you. Then get another smart kid to confirm if the first smart kid got it right. Be sure to tell everyone this is called ‘self-directed learning’” (Dee, 2012, p. 92).

Preparing saves you Time in the Long Run

I thought Mr. D’s section on marking was particularly useful. He claims that preparing a good test means making it so “a toddler could mark it with a crayon” (Dee, 2012, p. 224). While this is again obviously a huge exaggeration, I took it to mean that taking time to prepare questions, worksheets, tests, exams, etc. that are concise, ultimately saves you time. In the book he tells you about times where he has prepared exams the night before and how they turned out to be a horrible test of student’s knowledge and a huge pain in the butt to mark.  Obviously you can’t eliminate open-ended answers completely, making your tests consist of all essays or opinion questions will leave you with a ton of marking hours you need to log, which realistically no one likes. Students like to have their marks back in a prompt fashion and no teacher likes spending every single weekend of the year marking tests. So, the moral of his stories is preparing your materials ahead of time saves you time and headaches surrounding marking later on.

I think that these lessons, and all the other lessons that Dee tries to pass along through this book need to be taken with a grain of salt. Taking his comedic account of teaching to heart could result in disastrous outcomes in your teaching career. However, I think under all his exaggerations and questionable methods are some truths that every teacher could put to use in their lives and in their classrooms. At the end of the book, Dee included some accounts from old colleagues and students that talked about what they actually thought of him as a teacher. Through those stories from other people you get a sense of who Mr. D really was as a teacher: an unapologetic, hilarious man with a big heart.

Personally, I really enjoyed this book. It is very rare that I actually laugh out loud while reading but this book made me do it many times. I think that many of the lessons that Mr. Dee talks about in this book are very real situations that every teacher will go through to some extent, and the humour that he uses to recount his stories makes all his lessons very relatable. What I appreciated most about this book was Dee’s brutal honesty in regards to all his stories. The honesty and dignity with which he retells his stories makes this book relatable to teachers, particularly beginner teachers, because he assures readers that it is okay to mess up and everyone does it. His ownership of his mistakes as a teacher makes him a role model for amateur teachers in that he openly admits that he was far from perfect when he started out his teaching career, but that when he made mistakes he learned from them. I highly recommend this book to all teachers, old and new. It addresses issues in teaching that are very real but that most people aren’t willing to talk about. Most teachers wouldn’t admit that a student spit gum at them on their first day as a substitute or that they lost a whole pile of exam papers, but Dee’s recount of his experiences as a teacher creates unity and acceptance within the teaching profession in knowing that teaching isn’t always sunshine and rainbows but that that’s okay. However, if you are the kind of person who is unwilling to laugh at your own mistakes or one that takes your job as a future teacher wayyyyyy to seriously, then this book probably isn’t for you. The beauty of this book is that it was not written to be politically correct like so many other ‘handbooks’ are, it was written to be honest and relatable, and for that reason I think it reaches a whole new audience of people on a different level than any other book can. As I enter into my career as a teacher I feel like I will definitely find myself referring back to this book, not only for ideas about how to handle certain situations, but more importantly to remind me that making mistakes is okay and that I am not alone in my struggles as a teacher. 

References:

Dee, G. (2012). Teaching is harder than it looks. Anchor Canada.