Product reviews for Manglish

Lisa Ashes enthusiasm is palpable. She writes with wit and verve: every page is enthused with her impish delight at confounding expectations and subverting tired certainties. But she is far more than an aficionado of fun - the hard work and good, practical common sense that has gone into creating a useable template for designing a curriculum based on making explicit links between subjects whilst still maintaining useful division between disciplines, is admirable. In the hands of a less skilled practitioner or less thoughtful school leader, this project could so easily have been an empty exercise in bland content-life thematic learning that has bedevilled so many other attempts to make the curriculum -˜relevant' and -˜accessible'. Fortunately though, Ms. Ashes is ever at pains to stress the paramount importance of subject content and of building students' knowledge. Manglish also challenges all teachers to think beyond their comfortable routines and consider the ways in which we inadvertently but actively undermine each others' efforts to teach the building blocks of maths, English, history, science, DT etc. If we've ever been glib about algebra or spelling, we've done our pupils a disservice. This book eloquently reminds us that while our duties as teachers of subjects are hugely and rightly important, we must never forget our responsibilities as teachers of children.