Reviews for Management and headship in the primary school

The average rating for Management and headship in the primary school based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-10 00:00:00 James Morrison Holy crap, Dorothea Brande, why the hell is your book almost completely forgotten? I give "Becoming a Writer" five stars not because it's the most amazing book ever written -- it is, after all, an instructional book, and as such has its limits -- but because it feels almost like it was written yesterday, not 75 years ago, when it actually was published. More importantly, it far surpasses even the most famous and best-loved books on writing that have come since. I couldn't bring myself to finish Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones" from 1986, and found Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" from 1994 flawed but better; Brande's 1934 manual, however, easily blows them both away. Brande's genius is that she doesn't really care whether you're talented or publishable, what kind of material you want to write, or whether writing is, in and of itself, an important activity. All she cares about is that, if you're reading her book, you want to write, and she's going to show you how to do it. And she doesn't mince words: Becoming a writer, she makes clear, requires strict discipline and continuous practice. As I haven't tried her techniques yet, I can't speak to how successful they will be for me, but they certainly appear sound: forcing yourself to write on a strict schedule, in various frames of mind, and without giving yourself any excuses. And I love the passage that ends the "Writing on Schedule" chapter: "Right here I should like to sound the solemnest word of warning that you will find in this book: If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is actually greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy early as late." See what I mean about Brande not mincing words? Even with pages and pages devoted to the writer getting in touch with his unconscious mind, there's nothing namby-pamby about "Becoming a Writer." A reader of Brande's book may quarrel with my assertion that it feels like it was written yesterday, as there are several passages that discuss using a typewriter. But any publisher who wanted to modernize this book -- and I'm certainly not suggesting such be done -- could easily replace the word typewriter with computer (and the words portable typewriter with laptop), and the meaning would be unchanged. Brande also doesn't write at length on the topic. As a side note, you have to give Brande credit in her passing mentions of then-contemporary authors. She somehow was able to name-drop writers who, almost without exception, continue to be read today: Wharton, Hemingway, Forster, Wodehouse, Woolf and Ford Maddox Ford among them. Granted, those writers all were quite famous in their day, but so were many others who are no longer read. (OK, I did have to look up who Kathleen Norris was, but she's the exception.) By the way, if you read the reprint of Brande's book with a foreword by John Gardner, it's completely skippable. Gardner may have had noteworthy things to say about the art of writing elsewhere, but here he doesn't add much, I'm sorry to say. No matter: "Becoming a Writer" needs no introduction, and its readers should just dive right in.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-02-11 00:00:00 Julius Brown Brande's book helped pioneer the contemporary monster genre of books on the writing life. Excellent book for all beginning writers and is just as useful for those who have been writing for a while. I would recommend this well edited edition to all: