Teaching Books

I didn't buy this to pass any tests. I have been reading David McCullough's book John Adams and watching the DVDs too. And I wanted a way to "move around" within US Revolutionary War history quickly when I had questions about what was happening (or had or was going to happen). So regular history books would be way too detailed. I got what I wanted with this book: Helpful "Timelines" and short essays that cover the main events of each phase and period of the war that can be read quickly and are well-written and hence easy reading too. Also, it's great to have the whole sweep of US history in one book that I can dive into at any point and not only get interested, but invest a little time to get a good understanding of what was happening. So it's useful as a reference book too.

I bought this book in May to prepare for the June SAT II in US History and it was amazing!!! Before opening the book, I took a practice test through the OFFICIAL SAT SUBJECT TEST BOOK published by the College Board. I scored a 650 or 660, or something low like that. I was a little agitated because I bought a book for the AP US History Exam and read through that entire tome. Anyway, after recieving the book 2 weeks before the test, I read it cover to cover and took all of the 3 practice tests. Though the highest I recieved on the practice tests was a 690, I somehow pulled a 750 on the real SAT II. This book definately helped a lot and went into great dept on post-WWI. The main reason to purchase this book definately lies in the chapter reviews. They are great and give you the exact knowledge you will need for the test. Also, with review questions at the end of each chapter, the knowledge stays in your head and you retain all of the information. Two of the chapter review questions were word for word on the actual test! I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to recieve a 700+, because with just a small amount of backround knowledge in US History you can learn all that it takes to ace the exam!!! A+, 5 stars, and my highest recommendation!!!

I will make this short and sweet.
I bought both this book as well as the barons sat US history book.
This one dominates in that it makes it 10 times easier to understand. Barron's has a lot of unnecessary info but it is much more thorough in basically all the reading. BUTT it is many times more boring and often very hard to read and understand.
I read this book about 3 times (takes about like 3-4 hours, short read!!), did the tests and skimmed over the barrons and amazingly got a 760!!! it was weird cus on the practice tests in this book, i score no higher than 720. the barrons tests are RIDICULOUSly hard!!!! might be good just for info review. If your like me, where if the reading gets to complex then you tune out, get this one!!! Barrons is unnecessarily cus i did not learn anything from that to be honest..
*make sure you memorize the ammendments,acts,court cases, and important election dates......which leads to (down)

BUY the sparknotes flash cards!! They work pretty. welll i thought soo.
good luck kids!!!

This book arrived when it said it was going to. It was in good condition, I would probably buy from this buyer again.

Not much to say. Needed this book as a text for a collage course.

This is an excellent book for teachers in all areas of education. Since reading is the basis for all learning, this book is very useful for classroom teachers, parents, reading specialists, and other readers who would like to become more efficient at reading a variety of texts as well as developing independent skills within the process of reading, rather than after-the-fact. Specifically for teachers, this book outlines basic strategies that can easily be used in the classroom. For students with minimal reading ability, the strategies are explained with the use of academic language that many disabled middle school and young adult readers would appreciate as lifelong strategies to use in a variety of reading contexts. I appreciate the fact that while the authors gave credit to instruction of the past, they provided reasons for change in application as we move students toward a world of problem solving and decision making. In my opinion, I cannot think of any other way I would want to teach my students to read and develop a sense of purpose and love of learning. I'm sorry that my teachers did not approach reading instruction with such a worldly view. Not only am I a better teacher, I am also a better reader.

This book managed to cram alot of information into a small amount of space. It remained objective, which is a positive. It was very thorough yet specific. I enjoyed it. IT wasn't even THAT boring to read.

Loads of best practises that is based on solid research. Quite a few eye openers as well. There are already enough of the quick do and don'ts books, this book finally gives me solid base I was looking for. And I totally disagree with others that the book is boring. I really enjoy reading it. It is not hard to read even for foreigners (like me).

This book was great! My classmates and I used it to develop a usability evauluation. Great updates!

This book should be required reading for anyone undertaking a training initiative or considering e-learning. The field today is filled with "rapid development" tools that provide quick translation of slide shows, and "rich media" courses. All of these tools are designed to be easy to use and rely on generic, uninspired templates.

There is much more to designing e-Learning than simply getting your content into an electronic format and making it available online. This book explains it all, and is considered a bible by everyone I've worked with in the field.

I operate an educational multimedia publishing group serving the public healthcare sector. I found this book to be eminently approachable and extremely well organized. I was able to read through it over a weekend. One can get to the key concepts (the HOW) of each chapter without being forced to muddle through the supporting theory. That being said, all major concepts are well supported by research and cognitive theory for those who wish to understand the WHY. It is important to note that the authors' focus is mostly on the corporate training world and adult learners needing to develop fundamental skills. Not until chapter 14 do they discuss approaches to more advanced learners. Overall, I highly recommend this book. It should be on the shelf of everyone who is creating e-learning for adult learners.

I was looking for a book that could provide tips on making online education more engaging. This book was rated highly by other reviewers so I pulled out my credit card and bought it. But I have to agree with another recent review: it's just too boring! The book is written in a style that is very formal and isn't very engaging. I'm a little disappointed that a book about instruction techniques isn't better written and a setting a good example of it's content.

Any writer should have this at their desk at all times. This book made me more comfortable with the semicolon.

For journalists, the AP style guides are pretty much the gold standard (or silver, depending on your economic policy leanings). With so much terrible grammar and punctuation, and often lack of punctuation, present in today's world, this is a must-have for aspiring writers, especially journalists.

There's no mystery here, and it's not intended to be a grammatically pristene work of art. It is, after all, a 96-page reference manual. If you are used to writing/editing literary and academic styles and need to refresh your memory on the punctuation variables in journalistic writing, this is an easy point-to reference that won't take up any more of your precious time than absolutely necessary.

It appears that some fool edited the cautionary examples for correctness. (p. 34) The grammar is poor ("verboten" as a noun? (p. 85)), and the usage is non-standard (Commas are "trundled out"? (p.37)). Some passages are self-contradictory ("With Adjectives, p. 37).

This book is not a total disaster, but I can hardly recommend it.

Written with lively and direct prose, Rene J. Cappon's guide to punctuation succeeds in being a useful resourse for the busy journalist. No reader need fear about getting bogged down in the finer points of periods. If such a situation threatens to occur, Capon is quick to suggest a workaround. This leaves the stickiest questions even stickier, a real prickle for someone as persnickety as me. But for the journalist, or journalism student, I heartily recommend it.

To those looking for a deeper understanding of punctuation, I caution against this slim tome. Organized into seventeen chapters by punctuation, some of them no more than a half of a page ('The Ampersand') and some as many as sixteen ('The Comma'), the AP GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION lacks the philosophical depth and historical background of recent bestseller EATS, SHOOTS, & LEAVES as well as the dry grammar books of days past. The examples, while fun, are not nearly as comprehensive as one expects in any book that bills itself as a reference.

By way of example, here is the entire entry for Irregular Plurals under 'The Apostrophe':

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Irregular plurals also take the apostrophe: children's hour, women's rights, gentlemen's traditions, men's club, and so do nouns that are the same in singular: the single moose's antlers, the deer's track, the two corps' travels. The apostrophe stays whether the meaning is singular or plural.

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No mention is made that it is preferable to disambiguate the singular and plural in such cases. Especially in journalistic writing, where clarity and simplicity are the twin grails of good style.

A dedicated journalist might prefer a true grammar of the English language or the complete and comprehensive AP STYLE BOOK. While they may be dry, they will certainly go a good deal further in answering the questions that arise in all aspects of writing.

I had the misfortune of learning geometry from this textbook as a student, and now I have the misforture of teaching from it. I remember hating math as a high school student, and textbooks like these were the culprit. In high school, math was always presented as a set of problem-solving techniques that I had to learn and memorize. I was generally able to solve whatever problems came my way, but it always seemed like a trivial and pointless exercise. Luckily, I had some great college professors who made me realize that math was much more than memorizing algorithms, but a comprehensive logical system grounded in deductive reasoning.

Geometry is the only math course in which rigorous deductive reasoning can be made accessible to high school students -- and not surprisingly, it was the first area of mathematics to be axiomatized (by Euclid). Unlike algebra or calculus, almost all of the theorems and formulas in geometry can be systematically obtained from postulates in a way that is intelligible to high school students; on the other hand, I have yet to see an algebra teacher attempt to prove Cramer's Rule or the Binomial Theorem to their students. The fact that geometry introduces students to a different, mathematical way of thinking is the only justification for maintaining geometry as a standalone math course, rather than integrating it into algebra courses. Otherwise, the "facts" of geometry are nothing remarkable in themselves. So what if opposite sides of a parallelogram are congruent? It wouldn't be that difficult to teach students that "fact" in an algebra class when they're learning about slopes of parallel lines. But what's important is that students understand and see how this fact derives systematically from already known facts.

What does all this have to do with the book at hand? "Discovering Geometry" reduces geometry to the same collection of facts and algorithms that students have been doing in every math class since elementary school. While the problems that Michael Serra devises are occasionally interesting and even clever, he completely misses the point of geometry -- to understand WHY those "facts" are true.

Unlike many critics of this book, I do not have any inherent qualms with the investigative approach to learning geometry. Investigation plays a central role in mathematics, and I applaud the author for giving inductive reasoning its fair shake in this book. But investigation has become more of an ideology than a pedagogical tool in this book. Even my weakest students groan at having to do some of the investigations, whose results they deem obvious. There are simply too many unnecessary investigations, many of which exist only to aggrandize the author's educational philosophy.

As a student, I used the second edition of this book. The author has clearly made significant improvements for the third edition, but there are still serious pedagogical flaws. While Chapter 13 is a valiant attempt at introducing students to the deductive method of geometry, it is too little, too late. High school math classes rarely reach the last chapter, and separating the proofs from the theorems themselves feels artificial and contrived. The author makes another questionable pedagogical decision to area and volume into nonconsecutive chapters, Ch. 8 and 10 -- just so he can prove the Pythagorean Theorem using area in Ch. 9. But if he would only introduce similarity before the Pythagorean Theorem, he would be able to prove the Pythagorean Theorem using similar triangles in a much more elegant and motivated way.

The unorthodox ordering of topics to which I have previously alluded creates problems for even the author. There are many practice problems that require concepts or techniques from later chapters. For example, students are asked to construct a square in Chapter 3 given a diagonal, before either the properties of quadrilaterals (Ch. 5) -- or even the properties of triangles (Ch. 4) -- have been introduced! How students are supposed to "guess" that the diagonal of a square bisects the angles -- I do not know. Furthermore, the first proof in the text is a paragraph proof that the perpendicular bisectors of a triangle are concurrent. I can only imagine the horrified looks on the faces of Serra's students. And these are supposedly students who are having too much trouble with the two-column proofs!

There are outright mistakes in the textbook as well besides the usual typos. On page 333, Serra defines an irrational number as a number whose "decimal form never ends" and a transcendental number as a number whose "pattern of digits does not repeat." So according to his definition, 1/3 would be an irrational number, and sqrt(2) would be a transcendental number -- the former false for obvious reasons, the latter because sqrt(2) satisfies the polynomial equation x^2 - 2 = 0. Moreover, this is something that a reasonably bright high schooler might be expected to know -- much less an ostensibly expert math teacher!

In his manifesto "Tracing Proof in Discovering Geometry," Serra attacks two-column proofs, saying that "so many students fail to master two-column proofs that some teachers are skeptical of claims that all students can learn geometry." While I agree that two-column proofs misrepresent mathematics and make proofs unnecessarily complicated, I'll gladly take them over "Discovering Geometry" any day.

Excellent condition. I used least expensive shipping so textbook took a while to arrive.

this book makes you think a lot... you have to figure out like EVERYTHING yourself... there isn't even a glossary... its hard to know if you got the answers right cuz there is no answer key... this book is made for really smart ppl...

This geometry book has thought provoking problems, but that is all that is good about this book. There are many typos and awkward wordings to be found, and even incorrect answers in the teachers edition (my teacher has been correcting answers in his book all year)! This book is also useless without the only conjectures and vocabulary, something that should have been included in an appendix somewhere in this book! If you want to learn geometry, this is not the book to use.

I've used an older edition of this book in a high school geometry class. While the hands-on approach may be difficult to those who would rather have the concepts told to them, it allowed me to grasp the subject firmly. By allowing students to figure out different concepts, this book truly facilitates learning.

Great textbook guys! I like this one because it gives the reader exciting ways to teach Social Studies. The book shows the reader how to make Social Studies interesting and not cause students to become bored with the subject. This book will also help me in my future classroom!:) The last thing I would want is for a student to become bored with any subject.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in receiving a multititude of practical ideas for the classroom, supported by the latest research in the field of ESL.

Gibbons does a good job of balancing theory and practice in this book. Although some of the practice can be applied at middle school level, the book is most useful to elemntary teachers. The 6 period day common at the secondary level does not lend itself to the integrated curriculum that Gibbons recommends. This is still a good read for ESL teachers of all levels. It is a book an elementary ESL teacher or ESL coordinator should read in order to set up a good ESL program at the elementary school level.

The book I recived was brand new as stated by Amazon. I also recieved it in a timely manor.

This book was recommended to me as a good resource for preparing for National Board Certification in the area of English as a New Language. I found the book to be easy to follow and informative. It provides suggested activities that are applicable to various grades at the elementary level. My students enjoyed several lessons based on suggestions from this book.

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If you are a teacher, you know there are a lot of crappy teacher "resources" out there. This book is NOT one of them. I bought it as a requirement for a class and devoured it in a couple of days.
As other reviewers have stated, it's great because it talks about the theories behind learning a second language through content in the classroom, but it doesn't go so in-depth as to bore you to death. Gibbons also has a great balance between talking about the theories behind her work and giving teachers concrete examples and activities to try out on our own. If you follow the SIOP method (or are trying to) this book supports much of the content of the SIOP book, but in more accessible language and organization.
This book covers teaching speaking, writing, reading, and listening to ESL students, in homogeneous groups as well as in an integrated classrooms of native and non-native speakers. It also made me aware of aspects of my teaching that can either facilitate language learning or create a roadblock for ESL students.
Overall, great book!

This Audio CD is a useful supplement to the Ordinary Parent's Guide. You may be suprised to find you actually don't know how to pronounce many of the letters of the alphabet correctly. It is very important you teach them correctly to your children, especially if they have any speech difficulties. For example, 'D' is not pronounced 'duh'. Teach your child the wrong pronunciation and they may wind up having some difficulty sounding out words. The CD will model for you the difference between the voiced and unvoiced consonants, which will be invaluable. There are also some fun song tracks, and the complete Consonant Rhyme, which is learned in the book. You can just turn this on, and Presto! It isn't meant to listened to beginning to end, however.

Parents must be part of the education of their children early on if children are going to learn to read and enjoy it.This book gives some great tips on exactly that. Also a must-have for parents are two lovely pieces of children's literature which children really enjoy. The 10-page scripted guide allows parents to start teaching reading skills early on:Life's Little Lessons: An Inch-By-Inch Tale of Success
and The Big Squeal: A Wild, True, and Twisted Tail.

So far, my kids are learning and reviewing the letter sounds and are enjoying the lessons. The rhymes are helpful. It is basic and easy to teach, and foundational for reading.

We are just beginning learning the sounds of letters, and what great focus this book gives you as the teacher. It guides you throughout the studies and combines the lessons for review. I have been pleasantly surprised about how thorough this book is.

After completing 89 lessons in this book, my daughter and I are calling it quits. We've worked on it on and off for over a year (she's 5 now), and for the sake of preserving a love of reading, have decided to shelve it. This book has been helpful in a number of ways; it is great for giving a parent the sense that they can indeed teach their own children, that reading is easy, and laying out a path for doing so. I have found it useful as a reference book, i.e. to show me what to introduce, remind me what the actual "rules" are, and give me direction for our lessons. However, there have been some significant problems.

1) The layout of the pages is daunting for a child. There are lots of words, no pictures, nothing to visually set apart the words that the child reads except that they're a bit larger. It seems overwhelming and very un-child-friendly.

2) The practice stories often make no sense, and fail to capture my daughter's interest at all. An example from today: "The black snake did wish that he had a snack of mice. The snake did scan the grass to prey on mice. The grey mice sat on the rock and ate nuts. The snake came to the rock. Hey! The mice fled. They hid in holes. The snake will have no snack this day." Awkward wording, nothing particularly interesting about that, no pictures. The optional follow-up activity is to illustrate this story and label the items.

3) The practice sentences are way too long, and overwhelm new readers. For example, the child has just been introduced to the "fl" blend (lesson 50), and reads the sentence, "Ducks in flocks flit and flap on the flat pond." This sentence is too long, has onomotopeic words with which they may not be familiar (flit), and makes them use the new rule 4 times!! Very frustrating for a child struggling to learn a new rule. This was one of 6 new blends introduced in this one lesson.

4) Exceptions are often introduced before rules. For example, today we learned that the vowel pair "ea" can sometimes make the long-a sound, as in great, break, steak. Okay, so my daughter goes to read "please", and says, "place". Of course! She's never been taught that "ea" USUALLY says the long-E sound. The old "when two vowels go walking" would have been helpful to learn first, not later. Also, today she learned that "ey" can say the long-A sound. So "smiley" is smilay until a later lesson... you get the picture. This has come up more than once.

5) Very rigid rules, introduced in a logical, but not necessarily helpful, order. Much more actual reading could be possible much sooner if they'd go ahead and introduce some of the more helpful rules out of sequence.

6) It would be helpful to introduce a number of sight words much earlier. Kids learn sight words very quickly, and a few of them up front can make many more books accessible.

If your child is VERY motivated to learn to read, I do think that this book will work. My 3-year-old son has this drive, and the first few lessons (we skip the letter-learning part) have taught him the basics of CVC words. But he would learn that just as easily if I just stuck some magnets on a board. My daughter is very global in her thinking, and is more interested in the content of stories than in mastering reading technique, and this book sends her running for cover. Honestly, I dread it, too. Fortunately she is now at the point where she can read basic easy readers, so we're going to drop this book, use it as a reference tool only, and continue with McGuffey Readers, Bob books, and everything on the library's easy reader shelf. For my other 3 kiddos, I'll be investigating other options.

very informative, has alot of tips. A phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing.

This book does a very nice job of outlining the interview process as well as all of the issues around informed consent. The book also is excellent with the whole issue of developing a profile for the person being interviewed. This was probably one of the finer elements of Seidman's effort.

I was disappointed with one thing. The reason I bought the book was that I was interested in reading more ideas on how to coalesce a number of interviews into a coherent whole. This was a weak area of the "Interviewing as Qualitative Research..." It was certainly addressed but Seidman's points related to this topic were not helpful. The book would, however, probably be helpful to someone that is just beginning to use interviews.

Overall, it is a good book. It was just weak in the main area where I was hoping to pick up some new ways to approach the data.

I was fortunate to take Irv's class at UMass. His book is the most comprehensive guide to interviewing, and I have used his method in my doctoral thesis and in multiple academic papers. Irv probably has exploitation issues with his method being used to collect consumer data, but the three-stage interview method is extremely effective in exploring consumption experiences.

For the novice interviewer, this is a very informative book. It is clear and precise and gives a decent history of interviewing and the ethics that go with the territory. Just remember that this is only one interviewing book. The author describes his method used at his university and acknowledges other methods. Over all very good. It helped me a great deal for my masters work.

Qualititative research is far more than asking a prescribed list of questions. However, the interview is key and core to learning what the researcher wants to know.

"Interviewing as Qualitative Research" by Irving Seidman is a concise but informative book explaining the whole process clearly. In fact, the strength of the book is not so much the content -- other books say the same things -- but the presentation. Seidman planned the book well, and subjected it to careful editing and organization.

Despite its short length, it is well-outlined, with a complete contents area, index, and eight-page reference section.

Chapters include (each has several subsections listed below):
* Why Interview?
* A Structure For In-Depth Phenomonologicsl Interviewing
* Proposing Research: From Mind To Paper To Action
* Establishing Access To, Making Contact With, And Selecting Participants
* Affirming Informed Consent
* Technique Isn't Everything, But It Is A Lot
* Interviewing As A Relationship
* Analyzing, Interpreting, And Sharing Interview Material

I fully recommend "Interviewing as Qualitative Research" by Irving Seidman.

Anthony Trendl

Excellent book. I used it for my three sons and now wanted a new
copy for my grandchildren. I highly recommend it.

This is a wonderful book full of info on how to teach your child using the Montessori Method in your own home. There are directions for making most of the maerials yourself, others can be purchased inexpensively. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Montessori education.

I became interested in this method of schooling the first time I ever read about it. I had yanked my four year old son from his preschool program because he had gone from a normal happy preschooler to a biting, kicking, swearing little monster. He also has a speech delay, which did not help matters at all because we could not understand what he was talking about when he tried to tell us what was happening during his day.

His father and I decided to homeschool him until he's six, upon which time we will enroll him with the local charter school. So I started researching different methods and the first time I saw this I fell in love. But my heart sank when I saw just how expensive the equipment is. I was also dissapointed when I discovered that we have a local Montessori school only to find out it cost more than we make in a month. My husband is a full time student on a very low, limited income. I could not in good concious sanction spending that kind of money. So I read everything, online and books, that I could get my hands on. And while all I read talked of the different methods, it never said how to implement them.

I saw this at Paperback Swap (awesome site) and snagged it on impulse. I am so glad that I did. It gave me everything I needed to get a start. It helped me understand the resources I already had and told me how to pull them together in a cohesive whole. I have four children ranging from 8 months - 4.5 years. The three oldest think it's great and they are so proud of themselves every day. Even my husband got in on it and helped me construct several items. We both love this book and I reccomend it to everyone that talks about teaching Montessori.

I also reccomend Seven Times the Sun: Guiding Your Child Through the Rhythms of the Day by Shea Darian

I am fortunate enough to be able to be a stay at home with my children because I want my kids to stay at home as long as possible (while they are young) so they can fully appreciate the family dynamic. Because I stay at home, my family and I are living off a single income and cannot afford to put our children in the Montessori program. I am still interested in the Montessori philosophy, and wanted to try to incorporate it here at home. I checked this book out from the library just to see how applicable it would be, and I found that this is a great, not complicated introduction to the Montessori method. The activities are great and realistic for little ones to explore and learn, and will be useful to them in the long run. They also don't require alot of "shopping" so it can be very affordable as well. I'm very excited to help my children learn with this book. I'm going out to buy this book right away!

I am a medical student, single parent and needed something to introduce me & my daughter to Montessori instruction. I plan to enroll my 36 month old soon, but at this time, she is fine in the care of her grandparents and in the evenings, with me. Until she begins Montessori, I want to begin instilling some of the instructions. I ordered this book along with one other you will notice in my reviewed items. Both books are very good in my opinion, and all that I need. Even if I never enroll her in daycare, preschool, this is adequate. It gives great ideas that a parent or caregiver can share while with the child. Very good quality book.