education-theory

Sande Cohen has always been an eloquent spokesperson for the "narcisistic" mode of scholarship, which he defines as a method of self-referentially and self-destructively performing the role of "Intellectual." In this dated-but-fiesty text, Dr. Cohen continues his argument over the course of several dense chapters, centered on the cry that academia must kill itself to save itself. Few of his fans (me included!) will fail to join him in his nostalgic cry for death, or at the very least dismemberment of the entire academic system.

As usual, Dr. Cohen uses the most fashonable theorists of the 70's and 80's to justify an implosive mode of Postmodern scholarship by which he hopes this suicide will come to pass. This slavery to fashon is no crime; in the 90's, plenty of other instructors at design colleges fell into the same bog of French theory that Dr. Cohen has, and he can at least take credit for jumping in the pond when it's popularity was on the rise. The real tragedy is that however elloquent he is when praising the wholesale destruction of contemporary academic systems, Dr. Cohen tends to meander sadly when confronted with the challenge of constructing anything in the aftermath. His own role in the pogrom he calls for is also a problem -- does he imagine he'll be keeping his own academic job in the aftermath of his proposed French (Theory) Revolution? Surely his role model could not be an Academic Terror with him sitting in judgement, but we are left to wonder....

Fortunately Dr. Cohen's blizzard of rhetoric tips us off that he's not serious at all, and this has always been his true genius. But unfortunately he also seemed to be trying to climb the academic rungs in this early work, and the need to "pay the bills" overshadowed his inner poet.

Perhaps in those days Dr. Cohen feared a loss of the legitimacy he had so ernestly striven for in his weighty ouvre; when reading "The Luster of Capital," the reader can't help but wish he had stuck to what seems dearest to his heart -- namely blood. If only he had followed his heart as much in this early book as he has in later works, we could have gotten that much farther along in his epic poem of destruction. But letting fall his pretentions of seriousness has also spared his readers the fog of his rambling ennui.

In his later work, Dr. Cohen has acknowledged to himself and his readers that his true strength is as a poet, not as a theoretician. He is at his best when singing the glories of continually staged conflicts and random beaurocratic violence. In this work, we see him struggling, conflicted with himself, trying to find his voice as a Nietzichian nay-sayer, a Baudrillardian bard. To give away the ending of his career, he eventually succeds and his more overtly poetic works are recommended. But for the die-hard fan of Dr. Cohen, this segment from arc of his early emotional development lays a solid foundation.

M.S. Cain obviously expended a good deal of effort in writing this book. Too bad he didn't employ an editor: poor sentence structure, mixed metaphors, and weak organization of ideas combine to make this a poorly crafted book. He raises some worthy issues, however, and one senses that the book is an outgrowth of his passion for the plight of adjunct faculty, his most interesting chapter. The community college is a growing area for research in higher education. Go to the Teachers College at Columbia University, New York, website for a list of excellently written publications on this subject.

Although the book covers the basics needed for effective career counseling, the authors need to work on spicing up the format and presentation of the material. The topics were difficult to read at times because the material just seemed to drag.

This book is very "dry," and it's hard to get through one chapter without yawning a few times. However, you do learn a lot. I do not recommend this book if you're reading it "just for fun!"

I bought this book because I am considering going to nursing school & thought this might help me see what it would be like. I read the book and also scanned through it and the topics just were not relevant to what I was looking for. I am going to purchase "Stressed out about nursing school:an insider's guide to success by Stephanie Thibeault instead because I that will be better suited to what I am looking for.

This book has zero usability. It is not an adequate source of reference for any course pertaining to transport phenomena. You would have better luck using the internet to help you get past advanced problems with which you struggle, as this book is poorly organized and has little to offer to the student of any course beyond the introductory level.

As an adjunct professor who teaches Transport Phenomena I purchased this book in the hope that it filled a void that has long existed in the area of solution books on transport phenomena; a good treatment of heat and mass transfer. The Schaum's outlines "Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulics" and "Fluid Dynamics" are good treatments of momentum transport. To its credit the book does include a significant number of problems in heat and mass transport as well as in the area of momentum transport. However the book does not live up to some of its claims:

1. "When students want to look up a particular type of problem and solution they can readily locate it in the book by referring to the index...

The not all of the problems are that easy to find. For example if one looks for transpiration cooling one is referred to problem 16-4 in the section on convective mass transfer. Admittedly this problem has aspects of mass transfer as well as heat tranfer but one would have expected to find this in the section on convective heat transfer (e.g. Transport Phenomena by Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot). Also the index fails to point to another transpiration problem that is solved in chapter 6 (Boundary layer flow and drag force). This is an even more unlikely place to find such a problem. There are a number of other examples of "misplaced problems" which casts some doubt on the editor's expertise in Tranport Phenomena.

2. The book claims to overcome a limitation of most texts namely that of presenting example problems in "abbreviated form which leaves out material between steps and requires that the students derive the ommitted material themselves".

This approach seems to be applied very selectively. Those problems in which the ommitted material is relatively trivial and straightforward are solved in gory detail (see for example problem 6-14). However for problems in which the intermediate steps are not so obvious (see problem 11-10) the intermediate details are omitted. Problem 11-10 is a verbatim repititon of example 10.5-4 in the above mentioned book by Bird et al.) It discusses dimensional analysis of a natural convection problem. Bird et al. appear to choose rather arbitrarily a non-obvious form for the dimensionless quantities used to simplify the transport equations. It would have been useful to explain how these quantities were derived but this opportunity is missed completely.

Overall this book is a reasonably good compilation of a number of classic problems in Transport Phenomena and as such is a handy "one stop shopping" type of reference for teachers. In my rather brief perusal of the book I did not see any new and exciting problems being introduced. Also I don't see this as being a useful learning tool for students since it does not add much to the current solutions that already exist in standard texts on the subject. In fact as a didactic tool it falls far short of the Schaum's outline series in that it presents only problems and solutions with not supporting theoretical discussion.

I have to say that in this book Mr Ehre ruins what is a timeless bit of art by getting all fancy-pants about it. "Examining how contemporary oppression manifests in art, capitalism, censorship, and education" - indeed. It's a picture for crying out loud, and a pretty damn good one at that. My advice is to do what I do, and just enjoy this fabulous picture, which has given Barry my 12 year old spaniel and me many an hour of pleasure.

This book stinkss for what it said about Skinheads. We are not all racist. We are just working class citizens. We may dress different but most of us hate racism. Do more reseach before you start pointing fingers at Traditional Skinheads. A better book is "The Spirit of '69"

The thesis of this book is that (1) tests of educational assessment are increasingly being looked at by politicians (2) this has implications for the employment of educators and (3) being very clever, we teachers should be able to come up with new wasy of measuring student performance that won't actually test what the students have learned.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit overly cynical. But not by much.

Politicians are indeed looking closely at student performance, and for the first time in a long time, thinking about grading how well the public school are performing. And to be fair to the teachers, the intent often has as much to do with individual political aims as it does with education. So teachers repsond in kind, ganing the system, teaching to the exams and so forth. The only parties being left out of this game are the students themselves.

Assessment is needed, both to judge how well students are doing, and to judge how well the schools themselves are doing. The finny thing is that there is a measure that's been ignored in all of this. It's called grading.

Countless studies have been done over the past 50 years to determine what the best indicator of college performance is. People have looked at SAT scores, socioeconomic status, personality and dozens of other measure, and the one measure that consistently explains most of the varience is undergraduate grades. That's it. Even given the grade inflation of the past few decades, grades are still a pretty reasonable indicator.

Outdated and boring. Dr. Gallagher comes across as a racist. Not worth the read. A racist tract.