Letters to a Teacher
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004)

Unlike most professors who write books about teaching, Sam Pickering doesn't like to give advice. He doesn't like to take advice, either. In fact, he is suspicious of the whole business of telling other people what to do. "For me to advise you would be arrogant," he writes in the introduction.

So in lieu of exhortations, Mr. Pickering offers a series of warm and amusing reflections on the teaching life. Some of the funniest moments come when he is describing interactions with his students. He writes of how he once told a student that she needed to learn civility. "The girl looked puzzled. 'Civility?' she answered. 'What's that? I'm not an English major.'"

Mr. Pickering's opinions on education are often surprising and willfully contrarian. "It is not important for everyone to write well," writes the English professor who teaches writing. "Writing poorly does not exclude a person from the pleasures of the bed -- or boardroom." As for core curricula, the professor could not care less. "One course does not a historian make," he writes. "If a child despises math, why must he take three math courses in college? On the other hand, if he loves math why not let him take all math courses?"

When Mr. Pickering does break down and offer some advice, it is usually gentle and cloaked in humor. "Parents will say dreadful things to you," he writes. "Do not let them burrow under the skin and get into your bloodstream. If you have to respond, go into your office alone, shut the door, and quote Tennessee Williams, preferably a terse, ripe phrase, something like 'Screw you' or 'Kiss my ass.' Afterward open your door, chuckle, step into the hall, and smile like the sunrise."

Mr. Pickering receives letters from professors all the time asking him to reveal his teaching secrets, as if there were a formula for classroom success that he's been keeping to himself all these years (he started teaching at Connecticut in the late 1970s). This book is sure to inspire more such letters despite the professor's reservations about his reputation as the Great Teacher. "I don't want to be a guru," says Mr. Pickering.

Too late.

The Art of Teaching
(Oxford University Press, 2004)

Jay Parini has been teaching for three decades. And yet he still asks himself the same basic questions before each class. "Will I make sense? Will the students respond in sympathetic ways? Will I look and sound like an idiot? Is my face well shaved? Is my fly unzipped? Will I make it through 50 or 60 minutes without feeling like a complete idiot?"

That's OK, he writes, because such questions indicate that he is "still trying to find the right way to present the material." In this collection of essays, Mr. Parini writes about finding your teaching voice, balancing teaching and personal life, and what to wear in the classroom. "As a college teacher, it pays to think of clothing as a rhetorical choice, and to dress accordingly," he writes.

He wrote the book, he says, because he was concerned that there is not enough discussion about good teaching in higher education. "What I'm really shocked by is that young teachers coming out of graduate school have rarely given a second thought to teaching," says Mr. Parini. In one essay, he encourages young teachers to state their goals clearly at the beginning of a course: "Make sure that on your syllabus you let the students know exactly what is required of them: how many papers, how long, when they are due, and so forth." He also tells young teachers to "make your viewpoint known, to students and your colleagues. And don't be afraid to change your mind as needed."

Mr. Parini thinks of teaching as performance art. He writes about the importance of selecting the right "mask" for the classroom. "Most of us are left to blunder our way toward a teaching voice that serves us, and our students, well," he writes. "Unconsciously, we adopt different masks, noticing (or failing to notice) their usefulness." Instead, according to the professor, the mask should be a conscious choice, one that complements the material being taught. For instance, as a young professor, Mr. Parini would pace the classroom "like a caged animal" and fling chalk at the blackboard. Eventually, he writes, he came to realize that that was not the right mask for him.

Mr. Parini says he hopes The Art of Teaching will be useful to other teachers, but he doesn't have any illusions about having said everything there is to say on the subject. "I doubt that any book can teach you how to teach," he says. "What it should do is get you thinking about the important issues."

I'm the Teacher, You're the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)

What Patrick Allitt has written is closer to an exposé than an advice book. I'm the Teacher, You're the Student is exactly what its subtitle suggests: an account of a university semester in the classroom. The book begins with Mr. Allitt preparing his course and ends with the grading of final exams. In between he worries about nearly everything, fretting about what -- if anything -- his students are learning and whether the sport coat he wears to class looks silly.

Mr. Allitt, who leads teaching workshops at Emory, is not shy about criticizing his own teaching -- nor does he hesitate to let loose on lazy students. He quotes examples of poor student writing at length and then skewers them mercilessly. Some students confuse the economist John Kenneth Galbraith with the scientist Edward Teller; others can't tell the difference between novels and nonfiction books. And they write sentences like this: "Many did not survive the harsh journey west, but they still trekked on."

While these examples always amuse, it is hard not to cringe slightly for the students whose writing is ridiculed. Mr. Allitt changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent but "all the examples are real" he wrote in an e-mail message. (When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Allitt was teaching aboard a cruise ship. A professor's life isn't so bad, eh?) "I find most writing on education rather boring, because of the high degree of abstraction many authors use," the professor says in his e-mail message. He wrote an account of daily academic life "in the hope that other teachers would find my experiences comparable to some of their own."

For the nonteacher, the book offers some insight into the frustration that can overcome even the best professors. Mr. Allitt detests whining students (e.g., those who ask for deadlines to be extended or those who shamelessly grade-grub) and after he recounts several such episodes, it is easy to see why. Overly emotional students also annoy the professor. Throughout the book, tears are shed over seemingly trivial incidents. Each time Mr. Allitt follows the same procedure: He hands the weepy student a roll of toilet paper and waits quietly for the waterworks to subside.

Despite his frustrations and complaints, it is obvious that Mr. Allitt cares about his students. By e-mail, he says he hoped to show that being a teacher "is a wonderful job but also a difficult one."

The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors
(University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

How do you write a lecture, create a syllabus, or lead a discussion?

In this book, Peter Filene covers the basics. He wrote it, he says, with freshly minted professors in mind. "I figured that new teachers in particular had very little luxury to entertain lots of theoretical discussion," he says.

The book is brief (a little more than 150 pages) but it packs in lots of advice. In his chapter called "Constructing a Syllabus," Mr. Filene tells teachers not to cram too much into one semester. "In a survey of the English novel, for example, you can't imagine leaving out Tom Jones,Vanity Fair, and Middlemarch. Then again, can your students really read 2,280 pages in three weeks and also write that five-page midterm essay?" he writes.

Mr. Filene suggests making a list of all the topics that need to be covered in the course and matching them with the number of classes. If there are more topics than days, start winnowing the list. "Engage in cold-blooded self reflection," he writes. "Did you emphasize [a certain topic] because it's the most important? Or because you wrote your dissertation on it and feel underprepared to teach the other sections of your subject?"

In his chapter on encouraging discussion in class, Mr. Filene recommends handing out a list of questions in advance. He also suggests making sure students feel welcome to contribute to discussions. "The sooner you start this process, the less inertia you will need to overcome," Mr. Filene writes.

At times the professor's advice seems pat ("To communicate effectively, good teachers present their ideas with clarity") and, in one chapter, he cites a 1987 study of teaching methods (couldn't he find anything more recent?). Still, he addresses nuts-and-bolts questions that more highfalutin books on pedagogy might overlook.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind
(Yale University Press, 2003)

Professors and students don't know how to talk to each other. They might as well be speaking different languages. In fact, that's exactly what they're doing according to Gerald Graff; he dubs the two tongues "Intellectualspeak" and "Studentspeak."

To overcome this, professors need to do a better job of explaining what the mysterious world of academe is all about. And what it is all about is argument -- or so argues Mr. Graff. The problem is that the kind of argument that goes on in classrooms seems different from the kind that goes on everywhere else. But really it's not, according to the professor. He writes that "a more conversational view of argumentation can demystify academic writing" and make students feel less like outsiders.

Sometimes that means altering the subject matter. "My maxim is, start with where students are," Mr. Graff says. "Students who might be hard to get fired up about Plato or Shakespeare turn out to be surprisingly smart about popular music or sports."

What is important, he contends, is teaching students the habits of thought that lead to convincing arguments. And those skills "can be used to move them back to Plato."

This semester Mr. Graff and his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, a lecturer in English, are co-teaching a freshman composition course. While it may come as a surprise that a well-known professor would be teaching a course that most English instructors do their best to avoid, Mr. Graff says he finds the class invigorating. "Being forced to explain yourself to undergraduates, I would argue, helps your research," he says. Mr. Graff and Ms. Birkenstein-Graff are finishing a textbook on argumentative writing, which is scheduled to be published this year.

While Mr. Graff's ideas apply to all disciplines, he is particularly concerned with the teaching of writing. He writes that professors "need to disabuse ourselves of the widespread myth that academia and intelligibility don't mix."