Issue 5, Fall 1992

William A. McEachern, Editor

Odds and Ends

• After your lecture, sit in the last row of the class and try to read your own blackboard.

• Spend a day attending classes just to be reminded how numbing it can be and how important a stimulating instructor can be.

• When it comes to picking up on student feedback, squint with your ears--listen, listen, listen.

• Remember that a relevant example builds a bridge from the familiar to the new. Samuel Johnson said "Example is always more efficacious than precept." And Edmund Burke said "Example is the school is mankind, and they will learn at no other."

• It's not the will to be a better teacher that counts but the will to prepare to be a better teacher.

• "Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind."
  
  --T. H. Huxley

  "We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure."
  

  --Oliver Wendell Holmes

  It took Harvard 275 years to amass its first million books; the second million took only five years.

  By now you have probably come across Bernard Saffran's regular feature, "Recommendations for Further Reading," which appears in The Journal of Economic Perspectives. He lists and briefly discusses selections of interest to undergraduate instructors.

  In the last two Grapevines, contributors have mentioned "road-kill." Life imitate art. The Wall Street Journal (7/23/92, p.1) reports that the new Road-Kill Cafe in Maine is doing well. Here are my suggested responses to "How's business?": "We are just scraping by," "Sales are flat," "Business is in a tailspin," and "Business is picking up."

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