The first full-length History of College Teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal--scientific, objective, and dispassionate--and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction.
Anyone who wants to change College Teaching will have to start here..
Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American College Teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America\'s least privileged students.
Nor have they rigorously documented College instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private.
The more that Americans treated Teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it.
But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of College teaching, which remains, ultimately, an Amateur enterprise.
They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to personalize Teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student.
As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction.
But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making Teaching more personal.
Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received.
In the first book-length History of American College teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints.
The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication.
Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a Teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion.
But we\'ve heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms.
American College Teaching is in crisis, or so we are told.
The first full-length History of College Teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal--scientific, objective, and dispassionate--and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction
