Teaching Company high school courses on sale

I'm probably going to spring for Algebra II, God help me. (There's a workbook, too, for about $30 extra, but it's not listed on the web site. If you order, call the customer service rep.)

This review persuaded me:

An Oldie But A Goodie
April 30, 2009

To put this TTC course in a historical perspective, it's course #102 with a copyright date 1994. If you can remember back then, there wasn't much of an internet, computer graphics were in infancy, and DVD technology was still being developed. Does this mean this course should be re-done and "modernized"? Well, that'd be nice, but it's really not necessary. But it does mean the visual aids, such as they are, are very basic, and the teacher makes extensive use of the simple old blackboard and flip-chart easel.

Now, I kind of liked that, because it reminded me of when I first took Algebra II in high school, 50 years ago. But if you - or the kid you got this for - get bored if there are no special effects, animations or related "eye candy" at every turn, then this course will indeed be a poor choice. This course is for those who not only want to learn algebra, but are willing to do what it takes to learn algebra. For those people, this course is an excellent investment. It's going to take some work on the student's part, first and foremost being concentration. To state it another way, if you want to learn algebra and how to work algebra problems, this course is a valuable asset, and if you don't, I'm at a loss as to what to recommend.

Most TTC Science & Math course are survey courses, meaning they "sell" the subject and its high points in an entertaining manner, and take you up to, but not into, problem-solving. That's NOT true with this one. It doesn't pretend, or even try, to get you fired up about algebra. This is a pure dirty-hands work-course. Frequently, the instructor will put a problem on the board, and ask the student to stop the "tape" and solve the problem. When you restart the course, the instructor will show the solution and what steps are involved. If you skip these problems, you have no way of gauging how much you've learned - or not. To learn algebra, you have to work algebra - there's no ducking this - and this course offers plenty of that kind of opportunity.

I'll also note that, although it's not on the web page, this course still comes with a workbook, aligned with the lecture topics, with answers in the back. If you're looking forward to a formal classroom course, working these problems is certainly in your best interest.

Another reviewer mentioned "Algebra II for Dummies". This is also a good self-study approach. There's a companion workbook, which I also recommend. (The price for both is only about $30.) Between this DVD course and the Dummies book and the workbooks, you should have all you need to fully move around at this algebra level. And if you'll be taking a high-school course, these two items will prepare you about as much as is possible.

Regarding the instructor - ok, Jay Leno he's not. But I enjoyed his "blue collar" kind of instruction, and I had no problem at all understanding him or the information he was trying to get across. And no, he doesn't look at the camera all the time, but this makes it "seem" like a classroom environment, where the teacher certainly doesn't (I hope) spend the entire period glaring at you.

I really enjoyed this course and got a lot out of it. It was well worth the price. For the intended audience, I definitely recommend it."

This is annoying. The chemistry course, which I bought just a few months ago, has now been revised.

Barry G on learning physics in high school

We had a bit of physics in 8th and 9th grades. My first real course was as a senior in high school. The teacher was very good and I was totally amazed by the subject. Although it was not calculus-based, it did use trig which we were studying at the time, and math and science merged very nicely. I still remember the lecture on the derivation of the formula for distance of a uniformly accelerating body, relating it to the "area under the curve" which in this case was a straight line, and thus was the area of a triangle. I wondered why he called a straight line a "curve", and the next year in freshman calculus, it again all made sense, when we learned integration.

I can't wait to learn calculus.

Or physics.

Speaking of subjects I intend to learn, The Teaching Company has high school courses. I ordered the chemistry course. ^* I'm thinking of asking C. to work through as much of it as he can next summer, before he takes chemistry at Hogwarts. (He's taking AP biology next year, when he'll be a sophomore.)

I have Nature of the Earth, too, and Building Great Sentences, which is fantastic. Building Great Sentences is so fantastic that the other night, when Ed and an attorney friend were discussing the critical importance of writing short sentences, I rolled my eyes.

"You don't try to write short sentences?" Ed asked.

"No," I said curtly, leaving the men to wonder why.

While it is true that I personally have not read Strunk & White, I have listened to two lectures from Building Great Sentences, and thus feel confirmed in my view that short sentences are neither here nor there.


^*"This course was an absolute joy."

what's wrong with Power Point

a comment posted about Frank Cardulla's high school chemistry course at The Great Teaching Company:

"I bought this course to help my oldest son in his high school chemistry class. I had a tough time convincing him to view the videos so I decided that it might be better if I viewed them first and then used what I learned to tutor him. It worked like a charm. I would bring my personal DVD player each day on my workouts and finished the whole series in about two weeks. It gave me everything that I needed to help my son do better. Honestly, as a college instructor myself I found it refreshing that he made extensive use of the paper and easel. It was a nice relief from the PowerPoint "poisoning" that we are often subjected to in modern day classrooms and board rooms. It also was good to see how he slowly built up to the solution of a problem rather than simply magically having the answer appear in pretty text on the screen. This course was an absolute joy. If there is ever another course produced by him in the future I will be sure to buy it."

IQs up, verbal intelligence down

PowerPoint isn't writing

if Abe Lincoln had PowerPoint

The Teaching Company

I just listened to the first lecture in Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.

Very cool!

Here's an "elegantly balanced and extended" sentence by Conrad:

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificant; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.

about the course:

This will be a course about how to make sentences longer; longer sentences, when carefully crafted and tightly controlled, are essential keys to elegant and effective writing.

and about style:

The basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words, and we build sentences by putting propositions together.

The style of our sentences is determined by the ways in which we combine not words, but the propositions those words stand for or refer to.

from a WSJ article about The Teaching Company:

As the generations of post-1960s college graduates grow older, they will come to understand that their expensive formal education, with its trendiness and lack of breadth or rigor or enduring substance, quite simply failed them--by failing to connect them to the riches of their own civilization.

Prof in a Box
WSJ
by WILFRED M. MCCLAY
Friday, August 24, 2007 12:01 A.M. EDT

You can say that again.