Jonathan Zimmerman. The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.

Abstract

American academic life is highly professionalized, except when it comes to teaching. Years of rigorous graduate-school education are dedicated to learning methods of research and writing in the particular disciplines, but almost no time is dedicated to learning how to teach. After a year of graduate seminars in Berkeley in the late 1970s, I was set to work as a teacher of undergraduates with no preparation of any kind, an experience that was then normal. Professional advancement for more than a century now has come through publication in prestigious journals and presses, and almost never from distinguished teaching. Jonathan Zimmerman’s marvelous book The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America explains why and shows that centuries of effort to improve college teaching have almost always failed. Eighteenth-century students hated the old technique of recitation, which required them to learn passages by heart and recite them in class. It was stultifying and extremely boring. But the gradual shift to lectures in the nineteenth century did not bring a new dawn. Dull lectures from uncharismatic teachers were equally bad. Underpaid professors often had to work exceptionally long hours—future US president James Garfield, for example, as president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, was forced to offer his geology course at five o’clock in the morning. Most students responded to uninspired teaching by cheating as much as possible, playing wicked pranks on their tutors, boycotting the most hated professors, and staging rebellions. Zimmerman mentions in passing Harvard students’ “Rotten Cabbage Rebellion” of 1807.