This week I collected my possessions from my old office at Hamble Community Sports College and moved into my new office at The Wellington Academy. I suspect you can imagine the emotional confusion that tasks holds. One consequence (and opportunity) of the new role, is a moderate daily commute. Approximately forty-five to fifty minutes. I plan to use this time productively; replaying the day’s events, planning the next day, week, month, year, thinking over the big picture, cutting a few kite strings and enjoying my regular podcasts (The Guardian’s Tech Weekly (30-40 mins), the BBC’s Click (20-25 mins), Slate’s Lexicon Valley’s (30 mins fortnightly, and easily the most amazing English CPD you can get for free) and the occasional and usually selected RSA lecturer – as these frequently explode my grey matter.That still left plenty of time to enjoy a few audio books and so I treated myself to an Audible membership complete with the first title free.
My first few journeys began and finished with ‘Made to Stick’ via the Audible app (a far superior player to iTunes, even before found the ‘button free’ controls for bookmarking and twenty seconds rewind and fast forward). As you can see I am only on Chapter 4, approximately 210 minutes and thoroughly enjoying the books.
It is not that I fully subscribe to Chip and Dan’s six sticky categories, templates, or principles but ‘Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credentialed, Emotional, Stories’ would, IMHO, be a decent recipe for making your lessons more memorable and don’t most students love a powerful acronym – SUCCES.
Given that the books is about making ‘things’ more memorable, teaching and learning, leading and selling feature quite heavily. It is therefore, right up my street, and possible down yours (‘up yours’ seemed rather rude). If you are an English teacher, there are a few additional Easter eggs too, urban legends, proverbs and fables, journalese, screen writing and speeches, are all explored in the first 4 Chapters, and I expect more to follow.
To add to my positive review, the books has a 4.7 average review (n=41) and this new teacher / review certainly raved about it. Listen here.
I’d recommend this book to any teacher – it’s probably 110% more useful than any of the text books you were told to read on your teacher training course!
Not bad for free, or little more than six quid if you want to purchase the book.
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