Resolution to pen teaching guide about to pay off

A former South West teacher has finally completed his New Year’s resolution from 2012.

Richard Routh decided in 2011 that the next year, he would turn his hand to writing and create a resource for teachers about how to deal with different situations in the classroom.

“I’d been doing casual relief teaching and got to thinking about the different scenarios teachers face today and how different it was to when I was teaching high school,” he said.

“When I was lecturing in teacher education the text books they have don’t exactly explain scenarios ... they don’t tell you about the incidents you have to deal with.”

All the scenarios in Pay Attention Please! were based on Mr Routh’s own experience in classrooms here and in Victoria as well as from his time as a teacher and principal.

“There’s 50 chapters in the book, the first one is about time management and if you’re not on time, you’re going to have trouble with student behaviours,” he said.

The book took Mr Routh four years to write before another two years of editing and restructuring to get it ready for print.

After more than half a decade of work, Pay Attention Please! is set to be launched tonight at a function at the ECU Learning Hub at Maker + Co, a venue kindly offered to Mr Routh by his former colleagues at ECU South West.

“They’ve sponsored me to use their Learning Hub centre being a past staff member of ECU,” he said.

“The launch will have an explanation of why the book was written, I’ll do a reading from the book and talk about my background in teaching.”

Mr Routh said his target audience was people studying an education degree and those who have just started their teaching careers with the book to serve as an extra resource.

The launch was at the ECU Learning Hub on Thursday night with the book to go on sale shortly from Brain Spice in the CBD.