# The Hapless Teacher's Handbook

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/phil-ball/the-hapless-teachers-handbook/9780091908973

JSON version (same data): https://www.bookquiver.com/phil-ball/the-hapless-teachers-handbook/9780091908973.json

![The Hapless Teacher's Handbook](https://quivercdn.com/covers/ebury-press/phil-ball/the-hapless-teachers-handbook_978-00-9190-897-3.jpg?v=2026-04-21%2017%3A48%3A08)

- Book: [The Hapless Teacher's Handbook](https://www.bookquiver.com/phil-ball/the-hapless-teachers-handbook) ([The Hapless Teacher's Handbook.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/phil-ball/the-hapless-teachers-handbook.md))
- Authors: [Phil Ball](https://www.bookquiver.com/phil-ball)
- Publisher: Ebury Press
- ISBN: 978-00-9190-897-3
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2007-03-01
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

When Phil Ball left university with a workmanlike English degree to his name and no discernible ambitions, he wasn't entirely sure what to do next. So like many before him he thought he'd giving teaching a go. Why not? This is the comic story of one man's painfully slow metamorphosis into a teacher at an everyday comprehensive and his encounters with other remarkable teachers and pupils along the way. The good, the bad, the violent, the victimised and the clinically insane: from his first teaching practice nemesis, Alan Plant, who knows his dark secret, to the pupil who believes he is a reincarnation of the poet Andrew Marvell. It is a tale of the highs and lows of attempting to teach: from the joy of really making a difference to young minds to being physically set upon by a teenage horde. And that's just what happens in the classroom. Beyond it is the real world of teachers behind staff-room doors: desperate lives, unseemly professional competition, a diet of cigarettes, alcohol and cold coffee, casual sex and general social dysfunction. Not a great example, but the truth...