Put a Wet Paper Towel on it, by Lee and Adam Parkinson

ISBN: 9780008474218
Amazon ID: B0931YYY8C

According to someone at The Times, the authors are "Education's answer to Adam Kay … Lee and Adam Parkinson are doing for teaching what he did for medicine."

The difference, in my opinion, is that Adam Kay tells a lot of funny stories about his life as a doctor, as well as having a well-earned grumble at the way the UK health system works.

These two (well, mostly Lee; Adam doesn't say much in the book) have written a rather dull book about how schools work (or don't) and end up with a grumble about what's wrong with the UK education system.

Someone who wrote the book summary for Amazon calls it "a side-splittingly funny journey", which turns out to be an excellent reminder that anything which tells potential purchasers that it is "laugh out loud", "side-splittingly funny" or similar is almost certainly written by someone in marketing.

I found hardly anything in this book at all funny, although that's possibly because:

  1. The first five chapters (of twenty) are spent talking about how (or maybe why) the authors became teachers - which is not a barrel of laughs about what happens in primary schools.
  2. The next 13 chapters have (non)riveting titles such as "The Classroom", "School Assemblies", "School Trips" and "Dinner Times", but instead of focusing on hilarious events which are related to these topics, the chapters are as dull as the titles suggest they might be; they really are just a description of how these things happen.
  3. The final two chapters are the authors' rant about what's wrong with UK education today. They may well be correct, but it's hardly anything to laugh about.
  4. A very large number of abbreviations are thrown into the text with absolutely no explanation whatsoever, which makes comprehension somewhat challenging. For example:
    • CPD
    • CRB
    • DAB
    • DBS
    • EYFS
    • GILF
    • HLTA
    • ICT
    • IEP
    • INSET
    • KS1
    • LSA
    • MFL
    • NQT
    • PGCE
    • Pob (I'm not actually sure if this one is an abbreviation or not, but I don't recognise it as a word)
    • PPA
    • PSHE
    • PTA
    • PVA
    • SAT
    • SEN
    • SEND
    • SLT
    • SRE
    • TA
    • TES
    • TLR
    • WOW

(I've omitted common abbreviations such as BBC, ICU, MP and NHS which I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect most people to understand.)

Some of the above are explained considerably later on in the book, but every one listed above first appears with no explanation or definition. Some are never explained at all.

Ironically, in the penultimate chapter (the rant about the problems with education in the UK), there's a mini-rant about the use of acronyms (by which the author actually means abbreviations) without any concession at all to the fact that it's been happening through the previous 18 chapters.

Further questions you may find yourself asking as you work your way through this text:

  • Who is Calvin Harris?
  • What is a learning walk?
  • What are multilink cubes?
  • Who ever does school assembly other than first thing in the morning?
  • What are slap bracelets or loom bands?
  • What are AC-12, UFC 211 and Scratch 3.0?

I don't recall my primary school having "classroom displays" which (apparently) the teachers spend considerable time during the summer holidays designing and putting up. I'm sure there was stuff on the walls of my classrooms other than just paint, but I don't remember anyone appearing to be proud of what it was.

I also found it rather surprising (and a little disorienting) that almost nowhere in the book do these teachers say what age the pupils in their classes are (they occasionally mention it regarding a specific child). We know they work in primary schools, but they hardly ever mention whether they're dealing with a roomful of 5-year-olds or a group twice that age. I would have thought this was basic essential information for a book about the challenges of teaching.

All in all, this is nothing to be compared with Adam Kay. It definitely doesn't deserve to be described as "side-splittingly funny", either.

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