I hope that, by the end of this volume, you will agree with me. But, in fact, I believe not only that teaching can be taught, but that if mathematics is to progress, it must be taught - to the bright young people who will carry it on after us. Of course, I am biased in my view, if only because I have spent the last twenty years (roughly) trying to achieve this aim. Send me e-mail so we can talk let me address a very common view about the discipline of teaching namely, as I was told again just last week, "Teaching can't be taught." Well, maybe, just maybe, great teaching is lightning in a bottle and can't be explained, but I claim emphatically that good teaching can be taught. If this improvement leads you to decide that you want to think more deeply about your current and future teaching, so much the better. However, I do think that you, as a graduate TA or a young faculty member, will profit more and improve faster from short, simple, clear suggestions that have immediate and obvious impact in your day-to-day classroom. This last is not to say that such theories are never useful or important-otherwise, Mary Ann Malinchak Rishel and I would not have written the long section on how using cognitive methods can lead to better examinations, for instance. This is not because I believe that theory does not exist or is not important, but because I think that good teaching starts with seeming trivialities-"talk loudly, write large, prepare carefully, explain a lot, be friendly." Only after we are familiar with such simplicities do we begin to feel comfortable moving into theories of learning. If I seem to emphasize first-and second-person narrative in my writing, it is because much of this text has come, literally, from discussion with you, the TA or junior faculty member, about the real world situations we are encountering daily in our classrooms.Īt most every juncture in the text, I emphasize nuts and bolts considerations over theory. My view is personal, informed by over forty years in higher education, over thirty of them teaching in some form or another, and almost twenty of those involved with training and evaluating teaching assistants and junior faculty. This is a text about teaching college mathematics.
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