That's Special

A Survival Guide To Teaching

Non-Fiction - Education
150 Pages
Reviewed on 09/29/2015
Buy on Amazon

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    Book Review

Reviewed by Roy T. James for Readers' Favorite

That’s Special: A Survival Guide To Teaching by Dan Henderson is a collection of humorous stories of kids pushing buttons. Dan begins with the story of one such student, Chase. The harder the school came down on Chase, the more he rebelled. He recounts many other challenges such as a child with an obsession to win at every game exhibiting frequent tantrums, or a nine-year-old addicted to Play Station. In each of these instances, the importance of breaks and other methods of positive redirection, like rewards and incentives, are emphasized. The author gives a few suggestions for logical steps in administering consequences to contain wild behavior, such as issuing warnings, informing parents, and the need to follow through on threats so that students will continue respecting authority. The message conveyed by the book is to make learning fun.

In That’s Special: A Survival Guide To Teaching, Dan Henderson offers practical tools to help us in learning how to teach kids. Dan, while he says teaching should be fun, mentions that happiness should be an important aim of education, and a good education should contribute significantly to personal and collective happiness. While reiterating the necessity for a teacher to understand the students, we are reminded of the necessity to stand up to bullies. I liked his take on insanity - repeating the same experiment and expecting different results. And a teacher should always follow the rather saner path of trying different systems to correct a child! This book is a repository of wise counsel, and it introduces a correlation between academic achievement and happiness.