Learning Journal

My most critical incident this week has been trying to use a less than satisfactory textbook to plan lessons from. And by ‘plan lessons from’, I mean learn the stuff myself beforehand and then figure out how to teach it to others.
For my AS psychology lessons I have a wealth of material – two textbooks, two support books, and also it is quite well covered on the internet if I want to find anything extra. But for A2 psychology I have one textbook (written by Christine Brain!) and it is very, very bad indeed.
I have heard the phrase ‘fundamental disconnect’ before, and although it is a rather stupid phrase with overtones of either a psychotherapist or a management guru, it serves well enough to describe this A2 textbook. Every topic is broken down into a million fragments of facts and has to be painfully reconstituted. If it were pottery, not even the Time Team could put it back together.
For example, the section on long-term deprivation and privation is laid out with the effects of long-term deprivation by death, which is then compared with divorce, then family re-ordering, then the effects of long-term deprivation, then the effects of privation, then a discussion of privation, then case studies of privation. It’s an Eton Mess of psychology, and perhaps fit only for Boris Johnson, although he’d probably just complain about the lack of mention of English psychologists.
This concerns me. My mother is a secondary school teacher and has all sorts of help from the many textbooks and even CDs that she has at hand. She has pre-prepared schemes of work, exercises, even example lesson plans. I would eat my fist for such goodies!
In an unhappy muddle, I talked to my mentor. Why, she find Brain useless too, and prefers others books – colourful, thoughtfully written, packed with exercises and examples – and now I am going to photocopy bits out of them and use them to plan the lesson. And learn the topic. And also to provide useful exercises and examples.
The lesson is – go for the textbooks that makes it easiest!
In a related note, the teachers support pack that I use for AS apparently costs almost £70 when it is nothing more than pages of dull questions based around unamusing fictional examples – such as ‘Warthogs School for Witches’ – that serve to beat the knowledge into the heads of the students with the cudgel of imaginationlessness. How lucrative. I gotta get me some of that action.