There are indeed too few books about teaching methodology, and the few books I have found on the subject previously propose lesson plans, or offer generalizations about teaching philosophy. I took a couple of classes on how to teach literature and composition during my PhD program, but I do not recall much practical advice in the books these courses utilized. Professional association sessions on teaching methodology also tend to avoid specifics: this might be because mentorship is a prized asset in academia, so those who benefit from offering it to younger teachers tend to not want to advertise these lessons without equivalent reimbursements in prestige, if not in monetary terms. This particular book comes from the “author of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s popular “Pedagogy Unbound” column…” The summary argues: “College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are still trained to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom.” In practice, most instructors are asked to teach developmental or introductory classes where the majority of students have broken attention spans that inspire them to frequently disrupt classes, and plagiarism and cheating is rampant. In a climate where a majority of these students might be intoxicated on liquor or drugs, the act of standing in front of a class and attempting to deliver a lecture becomes as contentious as jumping in front of a tank in China. Instead of delivering new research and old information in a unique and engaging manner, teachers are asked to police a student body that expects to receive easy-A’s in exchange for paying astronomical fees that will put them in debt across the following decades, and paying still more to plagiarists-for-hire and the like to avoid learning while they inquire this education debt. Before women and minorities entered academia, there were a few white men who gained tenure and have since refused to perform much more “research”, convincing universities that all scholars are lazy and prefer to plagiarize themselves and their old ideas. These old white men are still there and they will retain these jobs across the coming couple of decades until all tenure is probably going to be eliminated, and the influx of newly minted PhDs who were raised under the idealistic notion that academia was a scholarly endeavor are going to be teaching introductory writing or mathematics to increasingly legally-stoned populace. But, back to the topic of this book: do these new PhDs need to learn how to teach in this anti-intellectual environment? Even if we all wish we can turn back time, the realities of America’s education system persist, so we must all understand this anti-intellectual enemy if we hope to survive or outlast it.
It would be great if this book helped in this regard, but signs of trouble surface: “There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn.” A revolution in learning? I just described this revolution: it’s a revolution wherein anti-intellectual, unfocused and undisciplined plagiarists and cheaters take over the classroom, preventing their studious peers from being able to learn as well. But, no, this scholar perceives this as a positive revolution, apparently a new “brain” has been invented… No, a new “understanding of how the brain works”… What brain science is he going to attempt? What does brain chemistry have to do with teaching, unless he is going to talk about attention-deficit? He is hoping that those who buy this book will be too distracted themselves to ponder about all this by actually reading this book: “But most academics have neither the time nor the resources to catch up to the latest research or train themselves to be excellent teachers.” Why would these lazy academics buy this book, and if the more studious teachers buy this book, why do they need to be lectured about the lazy ones that did not buy this book? Finally, the summary explains these new brain-discoveries: “From active-learning strategies to course design to getting students talking,” it “walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much students learn.” A translation is needed for those outside of academia: professors are ranked in America based on the grades they give their students. A professor who gives easy-A’s to nearly all of their students, receives positive reviews from the students in return; these reviews are used to promote these easy graders, while also helping to fire the honest teachers who give the F’s their students deserve. Focusing on “success” means giving students A’s, and in an environment where the revolution has been for industrial-sized cheating and plagiarism, this easy-grader has to ignore these problems even if their entire class never comes to class, and submits their tests via a representative test-taker. “Active-learning” means that as students are tossing books or gums at the instructor, the nimble instructor has to avoid these obstacles, and ideally should stop coming to class him or herself, to allow students to go play sports or engage in recreational sex, or anything else that avoid “learning”. How else can students be “learning” if the professor is not “lecturing”? Administrators keep this anti-intellectual system going because they make ten-fold the salary of an average instructor; so, obviously, the author of this book belongs to this class: “David Gooblar is Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University.” Academia covers all this anti-intellectualism and academic fraud because it controls the few surviving newspapers and magazines discussing academia without being necessarily run from inside one of these universities, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has chosen Gooblar to be a representative for “pedagogy”.
While I wish I was wrong about Gooblar’s intentions, the interior confirms what the previous few dozen books I read on this subject have solidified; Gooblar instructs instructors to: “Let Students Own the Course” (give easy A’s and let them stand on their heads if they wish) and that “Assessment Isn’t Just Assessment” (don’t give the grade they deserve, but rather the A administrators require for you to keep your job) in the titles of his chapters. Amazingly the “Introduction” opens by making an incredibly sexist statement: “The most knowledgeable and prepared teacher in the world is a failure if her students don’t learn” (1). Gooblar assumes that the teacher facing this “tumultuous” introductory class full of students incapable of learning must be a woman; whereas male teachers are more likely to enter academia as “assistant professors”, a role that does have research components, and that tends to put these professors in front of a more interested in learning upper level undergraduate or graduate audiences. The writing style throughout is devoid of citations, scholarship, or big words, relying primarily on the innate wisdom Gooblar has apparently gathered from all of his administering (and away from the pesky business of teaching). Here is a random example of this style: “When we construct our syllabi, we devote a higher percentage of the final grade to assignments we think are more important or difficult” (45). Who is this “we”? What might make an assignment “difficult”? What proof does Gooblar have that all syllabi are heavy on “difficult” assignments? This is all pure fiction and nonsense. From the administrator’s perspective, it is all about “Salesmanship”, as the next section is called; it starts with the question: “Why should students take your course?” (46). The answer, an instructor is programmed to give is, “because it is required”… But who are these dim students that pay up to $60,000 per year and don’t know why they have signed up for a course? Asking teachers to sell their courses like a salesman sells watches at the side of the road helps to demean instructors in the students’ eyes, helping to spread the notion that cheating is fitting if academia is made up of salesman who are just after the money, rather than out to impart knowledge. Later in the book, Gooblar offers a standard “Peer Review Worksheet” questions (he must have borrowed from one of his instructors) on one page (94) and on the next he summarizes an anti-intellectual philosophy from Cunningham and Helms: “one goal of a university-level science course should be to disrupt students’ assumptions about scientific knowledge as straightforwardly discovered and verified” (95). Inserting Dadaist absurdity or destructionist-nonsense-philosophy into an introductory science course is the most violent and destructive anti-intellectual act I can imagine. Try to picture a chemistry class, where the instructor insists on giving the wrong directions for a chemistry experiment to prove that scientific facts cannot be verified: the students mix the wrong ingredients, which leads to a giant explosion that takes out the building… I can’t continue reading Gooblar’s book, as if he sets the rest of academia aflame, I might have to agree that it is indeed a “revolution” that I am fighting against.