Think Like a Teacher: hard-copy version

I printed out a short run of 50 copies of my new book Think Like a Teacher. These copies got printed onto B5-size paper, making them a bit larger than I'd originally wanted, and the text size inside each book is correspondingly larger to keep things proportional. If you buy the hardcover version of my book via Amazon, it's going to be slightly smaller (both the book and the text); the spine will be black, and there'll be no spine text. With the in-Korea hard copy, the spine has text, although the print-shop lady inverted the colors to make it black text on a white background. I didn't mind; the color scheme works.

  

The book has a lot crammed into it. It's a sort of crash course on the very basics of teaching—short on details but long on foundational principles of good education, from the idea of checking student knowledge (as opposed to just lecturing and thinking that's enough) to designing appropriate tests, practicing patience and consistency, having goals and methods for reaching those goals, and learning while you teach. The book is part self-improvement, part educational psychology, part well-grounded common sense. It could become the start of a series should there be a demand for such. If you know of anyone who might be interested in homeschooling, or who might be interested in teaching in general, point them my way.

About the physical qualities of the hard copies I received: I like how the insides of the books turned out, but I'm a bit on the fence about the covers. From a distance, the covers look nice, but when you run your fingers gently (and sexily) over their surface, you can feel the ink or toner, which rises very slightly off the page. I'd been curious as to how the covers were going to turn out; the lady had shown me, last week, that she planned to use a glossy cover stock, and I crazily wondered whether she had some special, tattoo-like method for injecting ink under the glossy layer. Turns out she simply printed the cover images right onto the gloss; I have no idea how durable such a cover will be over time. Not that I really expected a super-high-quality job from a university print shop, but I was still a wee bit disappointed. Aside from that quibble, though, I thought the lady had done a good job, and I might use her again for the printed-in-Korea version of my upcoming movie-review book. At least she's friendly. (And I think I met other members of her family Tuesday evening: there was someone there who could have been her father or husband, and a young woman who could have been a daughter or niece.)

Anyway, for interested parties who are not close friends (I know this blog has some lurkers), you can buy a hard copy directly from me for $6 plus shipping. Email me an address; I'll get back to you with shipping cost, and the rest can be done via PayPal. Otherwise, as linked above, you can buy a hard copy or e-book via Amazon.