When first picking up the book Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak, I expected to read complex essays expounding on pedagogical theory. Instead, I found a great deal of humor, hope, openness, and wonderful stories.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "Teaching Characteristics," contains six essays--all captivating to read. For example, in the first essay by Peter Beidler, he attempts to define "good teaching."

A good teacher is fair to students, cares about them, and models the life of the mind. No, too sappy. A good teacher loves her students, loves her subject, and loves the society she prepares her students to serve. No, too saccharine.... Good teachers don't sexually harass their students. No, too controversial (p. 3).

In the end, there a re numerous definitions of "good teaching" that ring true. But by reading the definitions and the characteristics of good teachers, I think that most faculty members will be able to appreciate their own teaching styles while learning how to take on new attributes that can only help to improve the learning of students in the classroom.

"Teaching Practices," the second part of this book, contains a large number of very useful activities directly applicable to "real world teaching." While some of these activities are easy to apply (and can be done immediately after reading the essay), others reflect a theory or approach to teaching that each reader can choose to use in his or her own individual way. From "Creating Global Classrooms," by Mark C. Taylor:

The arrival of the much-hyped information superhighway is transforming the landscape of higher education in obvious and not-so obvious ways. While enthusiastic supporters welcome these new developments as creating new opportunities for research and teaching, suspicious critics greet these changes as threats that call into question the very foundation of knowledge and the rationale for long-established institutions of learning (p. 134)

This second section discusses issues from effective learning, to cyberspace, to collaborative teaching techniques. Each essay is sure to give some insight into how, with a little change, a class period can go from "good" to "inspiring."

The final two sections, "Teaching Philosophies" and "Teaching Teachers: Two Postscripts," continue the themes set in the beginnings of this book. One of my favorite essays comes in the third section. This essay, "A Story Waiting To Be Told: Narratives of Teaching, Scholarship, and Theory," contains a section which explains the intertwining of academic development and personal development ("Passion, Preparation, and Blues Singing"). Certainly a testament to the import ance of weaving together of knowledge from both the student and the teacher.

I will continue as an explorer of consciousness and, in the end, I say to my students what Seamus Heaney's literary ancestor said to him in Station Island (1984): 'You listened long enough. Now strike your note'" (p. 175).

While few faculty members have the time to "joy read," this book will make you glad that you took the time! It is warm, wonderful, an d filled with time-tested advice and good practice.

Catherine Wehlburg
Stephens College