47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Useful, enjoyable, energizing, April 19, 2005
This review is from: The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series) (Paperback)
I read this book as part of an effort to catch my breath during Spring Break in my first semester teaching a large college class. It left me feeling re-energized and excited about the new ideas I learned, and gave me new perspective on the whole undertaking. It is chock full of really useful and thought-provoking insights and suggestions. Reading the book basically got me ready to get back to teaching with renewed enthusiasm and confidence.
I would recommend this enjoyable and extremely useful book to any college teacher looking for new ideas and techniques--even a fresh attitude toward how they approach the classroom and their students.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading, August 10, 2008
This review is from: The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series) (Paperback)
I felt I was still unprepared for what stepping into a classroom might be like, even after having taken a short preparatory course for social science teaching in college. I will begin teaching in a matter of weeks, and this author has helped me tremendously by pointing out some my blind spots which have been created by years of graduate school. These include the differences between how graduate students and undergrads learn (less abstract and more examples) and that one must observe the campus and the classroom in order to gauge what are reasonable expectations in terms of reading comprehension and grading. He also presents helpful guides for syllabi construction and discussion groups.
I really felt like the author was speaking to me in terms of the way I think. A wonderful, useful read!
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Focused on disciplines in the humanities, June 29, 2010
The title and several of the other reviews are misleading. This book is by far most useful as a practical guide for college instructors in the humanities. As a mathematics instructor, I found some useful information in this book, but many of the tips and techniques were irrelevant or inapplicable to my situation. I am not dissing a learning-centered approach; I read and enjoyed Ken Bain's "What the best college teachers do." There, I felt the material was presented with a mix of broad, theoretical ideas and very specific, discipline-grounded examples with examples ranging not just through the humanities, but also through the arts, social sciences, and physical sciences as well as mathematics. Here, while some lip service is paid to other disciplines, a good deal of the suggestions and material, particularly in the second half of the book, are only applicable within a particular range of disciplines (admittedly a broad one).
For example, chapter 7 deals with broadening the learning environment and has a number of suggestions for things to do during class besides lecture or discussion. I love the idea of doing this! Traditional math classes are lecture-driven to an incredible extent and I think this is a big part of why people outside the discipline have such a negative association with them. However, there is not one example presented in the chapter that fits with a low-level math class without a ton of shoehorning. The portion of chapter 8 on grading focuses heavily on grading essays. Only in very particular math classes will you ever have the opportunity to grade an essay.
The feeling of being aimed toward teachers in the humanities permeates the book, not just in the suggestions, but in the tone. For example, in the perfectly general section "Don't be a perfectionist" in chapter 10, Filene says "The lecture that impresses your colleagues will fly over your students' heads." The implication is that if you come up with a wildly original and nuanced idea, it may be too much for undergraduate students. If you are teaching a class on the history of the civil war or constitutional law (two examples Filene repeatedly employs), I can see how this implication makes sense. If I, on the other hand, am teaching a course in remedial algebra or anywhere in a calculus sequence, it is essentially impossible for me to give a lecture whose content impresses my colleagues. I may be able to impress them with the clarity of my exposition, but not with any deep content that will fly over anyone's head. This is one example that stuck with me because it was near the end of the book, but there were many moments like this throughout.
I do not think this is a bad book. On the contrary, every part of it felt well-researched, and the text as a whole was not flabby, which is a particular danger of this kind of book. However, I think it is marketed in a deceptive manner, and I was tricked into buying it when I am, I feel, clearly not the intended reader.
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