My Review
The author begins this book in a truly maddening fashion. If I hadn’t needed to finish at least half of it for class I wouldn’t have bothered reading past page 5. The opening quote, which inspired the title (probably not the ideas though, as we’ll see later) actually turns “teachers” into a pejorative: “We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.” What in the world is teaching, if not designing learning experiences? Any class you plan ahead of time (teaching out of the copy of Wired you read on the bus that morning does count) is a designed learning experience; it may not be a good one, but it fits the descriptor.
For the next few pages he goes on a remarkably cliche rant about traditional methods and citing graduates’ lack of knowledge as an indictment of those lazy professors who “repeat the same practices…for years.” He suggests that a college graduate’s inability to date the Civil War between 1850 and 1900 is the result of poor college instruction, but I’m pretty sure that should have been covered more than once by eighth grade. You can forgive a prof for not including it on the American History exam.
He also suggests that students who take an intro class freshman year (with no later courses in the discipline) should be able to remember the specifics of the material 5 or 10 years later. This is horrifically unrealistic, and makes for an unhelpful criticism.
