The First Days Of School: How To Be An Effective Teacher

This was advertised and bought "new" yet it had highlighting. Also after 38 years of teaching myself there was little if any help for me, not Amazon's fault though.

I had to get this book for a class. First off, it assumes you know nothing and includes such chestnuts as "Hard Work Achieves Success". Gee, thanks. It's heavily padded with other slogans throughout the book, too.

Second it's written for mainstream teachers. I teach Special Ed. This book's advice is somewhere in between useless and dangerous with my population. I deal with some students most people would consider very difficult. I'd probably have people throwing desks if I used the book's discipline plan. I keep it simple. Respect each other. Respect yourself.

My other problem is the fact the book's layout is terrible. It uses oversized pages and tries to cram all sorts of pie graphs in the margins which is distracting. In terms of standard typography and visual layout, this book fails mightily. It's very cluttered. Glance through it. It's very tough to read in a purely visual sense.

Wiki Skinner's "Behavorial Shaping" and Bandura's "Observational Learning" if you want to improve your classroom. These work. Try them. I've found that the theory you get from Education classes about "contracts" and "7 effective habits", etc just don't work in real life.

On the plus side, some of the book's advice really isn't bad like "Discipline the problem, not the student," but it is kind of obvious to anyone who ever went to Sunday school i.e. "Hate the sin love the sinner". I don't really think you should have to tell people who received a Bachelor's degree (or higher) that. Maybe I'm overly optimistic.

I bought this for my daughter who was starting her first job as a high school math teacher. She heard from a friend that it was very helpful for new teachers.

The textbooks I ordered from Amazon.com came in a speedy fashion. I received them on the date that they suggested. Thank you

Came in when I least expected, really fast and that's great for people who have deadlines for an assignment.