Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Survival Handbook for the New Chemistry Instructor edited by Diane M. Bunce and Cinzia M. Muzzi Pearson Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003. 208 pp. ISBN 0131433709 (paperback). $20.40 reviewed by Brian K. Taylor
The Survival Handbook for the New Chemistry Instructor is an overview of many of the issues that new chemistry faculty face while preparing for teaching their first courses. The objective of the book is to provide a central source for chemistry faculty to find practical information on how to teach and how to prepare for teaching. The book tries to help both new and established faculty get ideas, and to help them to avoid common pitfalls. The tone of the book is purportedly comparable to talking with a colleague within the chemistry department. The text has a journal-like format and is organized into 19 chapters, or articles, each written by a different author. An abstract and the author’s biography begin each chapter. A bibliography or reference section ends each chapter. The background of the authors is diverse. One is a college dean, some are established faculty members, and others are new instructors. Some are from universities and others are from community colleges. The chapters are organized into five sections, with each section focusing on different aspects of the teaching experience. The first section is composed of three articles about firsthand experiences (both good and bad). Reading these articles gives a good perspective of what one might anticipate when teaching a general chemistry course for the first time. The second section is a collection of articles about getting started. One article is about writing paper and electronic syllabi, a task in which a new instructor likely has had no practice. The second article is about how to select a textbook and course materials. The third article makes suggestions about engaging other resources on campus, the library in particular, to help enrich students’ experiences in chemistry. This topic has very little to do with ‘getting started’ and consequently seems out of place in this section. Six articles make up the third section about classroom instruction. Surveys of students and faculty are presented in two of the articles. The results from these surveys give scientific evidence of the effectiveness of common practices in general chemistry courses. Seeing the outcome of these surveys could
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help a new instructor to develop a successful teaching strategy. Small-group learning strategies are the topic of two articles. These two articles are redundant and the subject matter makes up too large a percentage of the book’s content. The fourth section of the book consists of three articles about testing. Guidelines for writing a good exam are presented, along with examples of both good and bad test questions. Also included are methodologies for scoring exams and assigning grades. Finally, the last section of the book is about teaching as a career. This section is compiled from articles that do not really fit anywhere else. The first article is about using the Journal of Chemical Education. Anyone in academia should be familiar with the journal, and even if one is not familiar with JCE, nine pages out of 187 are too many. The second article is about getting a job in academia. Why would a new instructor be interested in searching for a job? The last article in this section is about experiences teaching at a community college. In my opinion, this chapter should have appeared in the first section. There are no articles written about teaching in a small university, or a large university. The absence of an article about balancing research and teaching causes this section to be deficient. Overall, I was disappointed in the Survival Handbook for the New Chemistry Instructor. The book is merely an assortment of many chemical education papers. Other than being loosely grouped into different sections, there is no connection between the chapters. The absence of an index makes navigation very difficult. At the very minimum, the abstracts of each article should have appeared in the table of contents to help the reader select articles of interest, without having to read the book cover to cover. The poorly organized format significantly weakens the effectiveness of this text. The term “handbook” is inappropriate for the title. It is not a good reference book to have within close reach. Although poorly organized, this compilation of articles does contain a significant amount of good information. There are many perspectives on the teaching process, and anyone who teaches chemistry would likely get some good ideas from reading this book. The spotlight is on teaching general chemistry, so those teaching upper-level undergraduate or graduatelevel courses would likely find this book less valuable than those teaching primarily general chemistry. Brian K. Taylor is in the Department of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, TX 75799; btaylor@ mail.uttyl.edu.
Vol. 81 No. 4 April 2004
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Journal of Chemical Education
491
