The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher: Amazon.ca: Harry K. Wong, Rosemary Tripi Wong: Books

Product Description

Book Description

Used by new and veteran teachers, college instructors, and administrators, this is a beautifully designed book on classroom management, student achievement, and teacher effectiveness. Color graphics.

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Customer Reviews

132 Reviews

5 star:		(87)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
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Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (132 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars I wish they had a 0 star for this book, May 28 2004

By

Chris - See all my reviews

This review is from: The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (Paperback)

I was required to read this book in college. I have to say it was the biggest waste of my time and money. This book seems to talk down to the reader as if they were a child. The books spends too much time telling teachers to do things like smile. If you can't smile at your students, maybe you shouldn't be teaching!

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for elementary, too naive for middle school, Jun 13 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (Paperback)

I have just finished my first year teaching and found "The First Days of School" useful for setting up a classroom but not for dealing with extreme problems.

Wong's book was an excellent resource for me when I was given a job description, a classroom, and little else. Wong will explain to you how to set up everything from your gradebook to your classroom management system. He stresses the importance of routines and procedures to classroom management, and he is indeed right. If you teach in a school where the students are used to structured classrooms and consistent discipline systems, this book will cover most of what you need to know. Buy it, implement it, call it heaven-sent.

HOWEVER: Wong fails to address the WHAT IFs of classroom management like: what if I'm doing all of these things and the kids are defiant? What if all 35 of them decide to act up? What if I totally lose it? These were the major questions at my school this year, and many of were dissatisfied by the way Wong assumed children would react.

Case in point:
In a discussion of logical consequences for a child not entering the room correctly, Wong suggests that you tell the child to do it over again until he does it correctly. I'm sure that a 2nd grader would repeat the procedure correctly and sit down. An older child at a school with a consistent discipline plan might do this as well.
At my school this year, our 7th graders (who had every 6th grade teacher walk out on them the year before and had gone through five Junior High teachers this year already) would do one of the following:
1. Scream obscenities at the teacher and leave the room (not to re-enter correctly but to ditch);
2. Re-enter incorrectly until the teacher went crazy and wrote the kid a referral*;
3. Some combination of the above choices, drawing the teacher into a time-consuming referral* while the rest of the class (35+ kids) got out of control.
*The referral would likely not be seen at the office anyway, so the kid's gotten off without a punishment and the rest of the class got away with missing 10 minutes of instruction.

Does this sound out-of-control to you? I certainly hope so. If you find yourself in a situation where students have become accustomed to these behaviors and you want to break them of these behaviors and actually - get this - teach something, BUY FRED JONES' "TOOLS FOR TEACHING" instead. Fred Jones will teach you practical solutions for these problems. He taught me how to deal with the preceding situation and many others, and I'm actually excited to go back next year.

Harry Wong seems nice, his tools are useful, but the second a kid is extremely defiant, his book flies out the window. Jones will teach you how to eliminate backtalk - and it works.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Book" for teachers!, May 7 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (Paperback)

This is the BEST book on teaching that I have ever encountered. I am two classes away from my MA in Education and feel that most of the required TEXTBOOK reading at the degree factory, I mean university, was a huge waste of time. Harry Wong's book, however, gave me excellent advice on classroom management and there are still many ideas in the book that I hope to apply one day. Everyone to whom I have recommended this book has found it to be the most useful book on teaching that they have ever read. DON'T start your first year of teaching without it!!!

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