Vikki O'Malley, Head of Performing Arts, The Market Weighton School (An English and Drama pupil of Hywel's)
I have just finished the book today and it has given me that energised feeling that brand-new teachers get when you first step into a classroom. Hywel was the reason I became a teacher. His enthusiasm shone through in everything he did. He told stories, he listened to our stories and most of all he was bothered by what we had to say. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be bothered.
After reading this book I realised that I'm already doing some of the things he mentions, and it has given me the reassurance that I might actually be doing a good job. There are lots of ideas that I knew of already and have used in the past but maybe I need to revisit them and pull them out of the dusty drawer. It's also given me the inspiration to try out new techniques with some classes and some students for whom I've maybe thought that nothing was working.
This book is brilliant for any teacher. New, old, inexperienced or near retirement. It's also very useful for others in education, from teaching assistants to further up the management scale.
If anything, it shows the reader that the most important element of working with young people is that to get the most out of them, you need to show that you are actually bothered. Bothered about what you are doing, bothered about why you are doing it, but most importantly you need to show that you are bothered about them.