A Useful Professor-ing Resource

After returning from a conference a few months ago, my department head handed me a thick, lime green book, and said, “I thought this might be useful.”

“Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis. Great,” I thought, “another 500-someodd pages to read,” remembering that I was about halfway done with another teaching resource guide.

There are so many questions about college-level teaching, and I’m lucky if I’ve found 10% of my answers. Fortunately, for me, I have an excellent department head that is receptive to my concerns and questions. But she’s human and has a life of her own. I imagine this book was a way for her to buy free time from my incessant grilling sessions. I’m not complaining; I’m empathetic.

So I brought Davis home and set it on my nightstand. That evening, I had finished grading, had lectures planned for the next few days, and nothing good was on television, so I figured I’d flip through the book and hoped that it’d be a method for treating insomnia. Within 20 minutes, I had read through 45 pages, which is an amazing feat for a synthetic organic chemist. In fact, my achievement prompted me to open my computer and schedule time throughout the week to read. I actually started finding time to take lunch breaks!

Davis is a truly fascinating read, and I imagine that many fledgling professors would feel the same way, though might even be useful for more experienced profs. Here’s the gist of the book. Tools for Teaching (second edition) is a 550-page bible that covers notions ranging from course design to running undergraduate research projects to interacting with large enrollment classrooms. Her ideas are short, to the point, and well referenced (if you want to read further on a particular issue). The other strength is that the major themes Davis presents are independent of each other, meaning you can jump around from chapter to chapter. I’m now in the throws of redesigning my syllabus, learning how to better advise students, and how to grade with more precision and efficiently (a task we all need to master). It’s gotten to the point that I’ve been carrying this book with me everywhere.

Pertaining to The Lab Bench, as scientists, we’re naturally wrapped up in our fields, so much so that we forget about other equally important attributes: eating; sleeping; etc. Particularly at teaching-focused colleges, it’s necessary to hone our “professing” skills (to a razors edge) to best serve the students—our clients/customers.