The Craft of Teaching: A Guide to Mastering the Professor's Art

At first glance, this is a trite monograph that describes all the obvious aspects of teaching at the college level. However, it may be useful for faculty who are just beginning their journey.

Unfortunately, I do not have this anymore.

The purpose of a class should be to make the students learn things, not to sort the dumb from the smart. To encourage people to learn, students are given grades. And thus, to encourage people to learn, we give benefits for having higher grades beyond just the fact of having learned stuff, for example scholarships or acceptance to graduate schools. There are some skills that need repetition to make unconscious, and these are ideal to be tested, because the act of repeating them on a test and studying for the test helps master them. A test that has tricky questions that will stump most students is worse than useless because it discourages students; all it does it separate the geniuses from the rest, and in a class, rather than the Putnam, this should not even be a goal, let alone the main purpose.Some sorting is necessary for good teaching. Little learning will happen in a skill course, like mathematics, if there is a wide gap in the abilities of the students. Ideally students should want grades that correspond to their ability. For example, I have studied German in my spare time, and if I took it up again I wouldn't want to be in a class above my abilities, because I would end up learning less than I would at the right level.In the preface to the second edition, Eble writes, "Under the domination of the research universities, research is about as compatible with undergraduate teaching as lions are with lambs. Only by devouring the other are they likely to lie down comfortable side by side." This is certainly true for the usual type of disciplinary research that is most prized by those in charge of research universities. What I think makes for the best teacher is someone who spends a lot of time learning and finding the best ways to organize knowledge- not necessarily thinking thoughts no one has ever had before, but rather thinking of the best ways to explain things. For example, Walter Rudin made a greater contribution to mathematics by his excellent high level textbooks than from the journal papers he published. A dreary poorly educated high school teacher who treats their job like being a Walmart cashier and a leading scholar at the University of Chicago who treats students like a distraction from "original research" are both probably less useful to employ as teachers than having students read textbooks alone.In places Eble talks about preparing assignments using pen, typewriters, or computers. This led me to check if a third edition of the book had been published, and I found in the October 23, 1988 Deseret News that Eble died October 19, 1988 after a heart surgery, the year the second edition was published.