I just read Syllabus by Lynda Barry. It is a set of syllabi and daily in-class instructions, along with some reflections, from a few years of teaching cartooning and writing at Wisconsin. It is a combination of hilarious and insightful, both about learning to draw and cartoon, but also about the practice of teaching.
A page from Lynda Barry's Syllabus.
The syllabi and daily exercises include many great practices. For example, when students are listening to something (being read or previously recorded), she has them either draw tight spirals in their notebooks or else color in a line drawing. She has the students sketch in non-photo blue pencil and ink in later; it reduces inhibitions. She has simple forms for students to write daily diary or journal entries so that they make close observations of the world, in words and pictures. She loves most the students who have never drawn (since childhood), and she makes exercises that capitalize on their newness (and defeat those who are more experienced at rendering), like forcing them to do drawings in increasingly short time intervals.
The book is hilarious in part because she shows lots of great student work (it is not clear she has proper permissions here, because she does not individually credit each student drawing), and because the whole book is a collage of drawings, writings, and found objects, in the Lynda Barry style. I doubt there is another book out there on teaching that makes you laugh out loud all the way through.
A great question for me is what of Barry's practices could carry over to a class in Physics?
