Teaching the Large College Class

Teaching large classes is a fact of life for professors at many institutions. In addition to pedagogy, instructors of these courses must also be concerned with legal, ethical, financial, technological, personnel, and management issues. Virtually all introductory courses are large ones, as are the popular intermediate courses at large institutions. Typically, little or no training or instruction is provided to new professors about how to manage large classes successfully. This book is a valuable resource for any college teacher, adjunct or full-time, facing a large class. It will also be useful for college administrators who might want to issue it to teachers, especially adjuncts, assigned to large classes for the first time. A distillation of years of experience by the author--who started his college teaching career in 1969--in teaching large classes and in coaching other professors to do the same, this guide is concise and user-friendly. It employs teaching-as-acting as a common theme, with many practical examples covering all of the major aspects of organizing, managing, and teaching a large lecture course in any field.

Along with four appendixes featuring a first-day checklist and samples of a course outline, syllabus, and first-day lecture, this book includes information on:

Thinking ahead

Getting ready for the first day

The teacher as actor

Managing assistants and graders

Using media effectively

Auditorium classroom activities

Assessment and testing

Grading

The seasons of a class

Research in the morphology-angioarchitecture and ultrastructure-of cerebral veins has been widely neglected in past decades; investigation was mainly focussed on the arterial side of brain circulation. This circumstance has certainly had a negative impact on the development of knowledge in clinical medicine about cerebral venous disease. Cerebra} venous pathology and its consequence is, however, a frequent problern in clinical neurosur gery, both with regard to operative techniques and conservative manage ment. Therefore, it is not surprising that the initiative to collect, for the first time, data on our present knowledge in basic research of cerebral veins, their structure and function under normal and pathological circumstances, came from clinicians. Regarding the cerebral veins the clinician has primarily in view the dysfunctions originating from embryogenetic malformations, phlebitic obstruction, tumourous shunts, or traumatic lesions. But in addition to that, particular attention should be paid to the microstructure ofthe venous vessel walls, their barrier function, and the venous vasomotor system. Studying these interrelationships has for a long time been both fascinating and of immediate interest to me."