Books | S.A.S: Special Ace Supply (Teacher)
Author Biography
Brian McCusker has spent twenty-five years teaching supply all over North Yorkshire, but is now training as a journalist. He can sculpt a head from clay in six months.
Publication Date
8 Jun 2007
Blurb
"It was to be a day of 'general supply.'
"General Supply, please sir, we are losing men and morale and the odds are overwhelming..."
"Get back in there, you lily-livered coward..."
Our current education system is on its knees.
Brian McCusker has spent the last twenty-five years teaching supply all over North Yorkshire and has seen countless schools fail innumerable children, as well as spending several months trying to sculpt the perfect ear. Who better, then, to follow into battle?
Join our intrepid SAS Teacher as he battles apathy and bureaucracy on a battlefield littered with portacabins, armed only with a wry sense of humour, a green guitar and a dream of Spain. There's unions that can't amalgamate, mad Hatters, virgin births, groundhog days and holocausts. This is a world that league tables and Gervais Phinn can't show you.
S.A.S. Special Ace Supply (Teacher) is a wake-up call for parents, schools and government ministers to realise that the education system cannot carry on much longer without serious consequences for a nation.
First Chapter
Click here to access a PDF of the first chapter.
Review
Class War
Forget about the blackboard jungle: welcome to the blackboard battleground.
Classroom veteran Brian McCusker spent 25 years as a supply teacher working in schools across York and North Yorkshire.
It isn't so much that the children are any more wild or less well-behaved than they were 25 years ago, he says. "I didn't have a fantastic problem with discipline," he says. "I learned to deal with it relatively effectively."
It is more that he has seen an education system that too often fails children.
"It grieves me that so many kids who want to learn have to put up with constant disruption," says the teacher, who lives in Fishergate. "There is a constant barrage of examinations such as SATs (stress, anxietym, trauma) without the balancing of relaxation...and a neglible input into spiritual development. Not to mention the terrible social naivety of the school-leavers, the biased middle-class curriculum, the ever-increasing workload of the teachers, the failing industrial management system, the lack of importance placed on creativity, and the general attitude of process before people."
Phew! That's quite an indictment.
Brian, who is now studying full-time for an MA in Print Journalism in Leeds, has got it all of his chest in a new book launched in York last night.
'SAS: Special Ace Supply (Teacher)' is an antidote to the Gervais Phinn school of writing about life in school. It is, in the words of Adam Kirkman, whose York-based Quick Brown Fox Publications has brought out Brian's book, a "wry humourous look back at ...supply teaching." Brian puts it more robustly. "There are several sugary books published where schools are seemingly made out of ginger-bread and where the kids dance gaily around ribboned poles on the first day of May, each with their own pet lamb," he says. "I show the other side."
- York Evening Press
Purchase Book
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