Hiç Kızmayan Öğretmen

The book opens with an unexpected confession: the author never wanted to be a teacher. On the last day of the university application the author put teacher training among the choices, felt the «world collapse» on being accepted, was sent off by a father's insistence and was even enrolled by someone else. Graduation changed nothing — until a future father-in-law said his daughter would marry only a teacher. Yet from the first year the children won the author over: «they even appeared in my dreams». This candid opening is the best page in the book: not about an ideal teacher but about an ordinary person who learned to love the job.

The most moving story comes from a village school in the east. In a school with ninety-three pupils and two classrooms, the young teacher is given sixty children, half of the second-graders unable to read. The village dogs are never tied up, and the teachers cannot walk down to the village without the children's help. One day, near the end of the lesson, Fatma stands up: «Let me die for you, teacher! Let me go home and fetch bread, I'm so hungry.» The teacher refuses, but when the bell rings brings a tray of food from the staff lodging and feeds the whole class. This small scene says more than all the advice in the book.

The practical tips in part two are useful. The author recounts a meeting with the mother of the twins Yunus and Emre: the previous teacher humiliated her at a parents' meeting, wagging a finger at her, and now the boys love school. The section on «I-messages» teaches saying «it upsets me to see you like this» instead of «you are lazy». The story about keeping one's word is especially good: having promised the children a PE lesson outdoors, the author takes them into the yard in their coats for ten minutes on a cold day — and honestly reports the headmaster's objection.

The story that gives the book its title concerns a chemistry teacher at the author's high school, Bayram Küçük. Mocked by the town as «not a real man», this quiet, courteous teacher never gets angry and never fails anyone. Two pupils disrupt the lesson; the teacher carries on. At the end one of them cannot stand it and asks: «Are you still not going to get angry?» The answer: «When we get angry, billions of our nerve cells die. Should I be their murderer? Life is too beautiful and precious to get angry.» A table drawn from the Adlerian approach follows: the four goals of misbehaviour — attention, power, revenge, inadequacy — and how a teacher should respond to each.

The weaknesses are just as clear. The teacher is described as «in love with homeland, nation and flag», «a soldier in the army of education»; the list of a good teacher's qualities includes «getting rid of regional accents and dialects» and «teaching the indivisible unity of the homeland everywhere». The scene in which a little girl in the southeast says «I'm Syrian, you're from Turkey» and is told that everyone is a Turkish citizen reads as very one-sided today. The quotations — from Rumi to Dale Carnegie, from the football coach Fatih Terim to Rousseau — often decorate rather than support the text. Claims such as «anger kills nerve cells» are not scientific.

Technically, but that is a problem of the scan, not of the edition. On the whole, «Hiç Kızmayan Öğretmen» resembles what an experienced colleague might tell you over tea: not all of it is scientific and some of it has aged, but most of it comes from the heart and can be inspiring for a young teacher.

• Short, sincere stories taken from real classrooms
• Every piece of advice illustrated with a real pupil
• Ready-made forms and observation tests for teachers at the end