My dad was a school teacher (vocational agriculture at first, then science and math for 7th grade). He became a Junior High principal and collected a few pedagogical chestnuts like this 1849 volume:
Lest the inexperienced teacher lack the necessary pedagogical skills, the author offers suggestions:
As a teacher with decades of experience but still anxious to improve, I shall henceforth assign questions promiscuously, shall require that my students’ answers “be rigidly accurate, as to construction and articulation,” and shall substantially increase the number of italicized words in my own work unless entirely prohibited.
Finally, it should be noted that even in 1849, 100 years before my birth, the better schools were practicing alternative American math in place of the European or Arabic or Chinese versions.
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About Scott Abbott
I received my Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University in 1979. Then I taught at Vanderbilt University, BYU, and Utah Valley State College. At Utah Valley University, I directed the Program in Integrated Studies for its initial 13 years and was also Chair of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy for three years. My publications include a book on Freemasonry and the German Novel, two co-authored books with Zarko Radakovic (REPETITIONS and VAMPIRES & A REASONABLE DICTIONARY, published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade and in English with Punctum Books), a book with Sam Rushforth (WILD RIDES AND WILDFLOWERS, Torrey House Press), a "fraternal meditation" called IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME (University of Utah Press), and translations of three books by Austrian author Peter Handke, of an exhibition catalogue called "The German Army and Genocide," and, with Dan Fairbanks, of Gregor Mendel's important paper on hybridity in peas. More famously, my children are in the process of creating good lives for themselves: as a model and dance/yoga studio manager, as a teacher of Chinese language, as an ecologist and science writer, as a jazz musician, as a parole officer, as a contractor, as a seasonal worker (Alaska and Park City, Utah), and as parents. I share my life with UVU historian Lyn Bennett, with whom I have written a cultural history of barbed wire -- THE PERFECT FENCE (Texas A&M University Press). Some publications at http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 