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发表于 2005-9-12 20:16:09
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该公司曾做过一个用户回馈调查，以十分为最高满意度，调查对象为3600名购买用户，结果他们制作的系列课程得到的评分为8.97，表现非常杰出。下面是众多美国用户对该系列课程所做的详细评价，他们各自列出了评价最高的课程以及讲授者，大家不妨根据自己的兴趣，以他们的意见做个参考，以决定自己究竟该下载哪些课程：
Teaching Company
courses reviewed by Philip Greenspun,
Home : Travel : One Section
The Teaching Company sells interesting courses on cassette tape, audio CD, and video tape. A complete catalog with prices and online ordering is available at www.teach12.com or obtain a hardcopy catalog from (800) TEACH-12 (832-2412). Mailing address is The Teaching Company, 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100, Chantilly, VA 20151-1232, fax 703-378-3819.
Below are reviews of some of the more interesting courses that I've tried. Courses are backed by an unconditional money-back guarantee. If you don't like it, the Teaching Company refunds your money.
History
History of Hitler's Empire; Thomas Childers. Winner. Important for anyone interested in political processes in America today.
Law & Economics
Economics; Timothy Taylor. Boring. This is the kind of professor who is popular with MBA students because he is sort of like them, shallow, young, credential-grubbing, and soulless. Economics is fundamentally dull and simple, most of the interesting stuff is mathematical. Taylor belabors trivial points over 20 lectures that an MIT undergrad could absorb in 5.
Negligence and Torts; Frank Cross. Real law taught by a real lawyer. Awesome. You need to know this. You will never learn it in a more painless manner. Cross's examples are funny, illuminating, and usually real.
Contracts; Frank Cross. As above, more or less, except that contracts is a somewhat less interesting topic for most people.
Literature
Great Authors; various. Winner. Eighty lectures that will give you a new appreciation for 3000 years of literature and inspire you to read the works discussed. I never learned about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at MIT.
Shakespeare; Peter Saccio. Winner. Saccio uncovers fun and meaning in plays both obscure and familiar.
Science Fiction; Eric Rabkin. Good. I've never cared for most science fiction, but Rabkin shows its significance and helped me understand my fellow MIT community members. Not boring, but won't stimulate profound thought. [A couple of years after I wrote the preceding, I lifted a quote from the Rabkin course and stuck it in Chapter 15 of my book on Web publishing.]
Urban Life; Arnold Weinstein. Winner. Draws on thousands of years of writing to illuminate the effects of the city on human life. Thought provoking.
Understanding Literature and Life: Drama, Poetry, and Narrative; Arnold Weinstein. Excellent. The 64 lectures would be worth it if you only took away Weinstein's idea of why we have plays, poems, and novels (rather than just one literary form). But there is so much to like here and Weinstein brings in a lot of unexpected works (though it is annoying the way he constantly refers to them as "texts").
Music
How to Understand the Listen to Great Music; Robert Greenberg. Very good. I have 2000 classical LPs and have read the jacket copy for most of them. Still, I learned a lot of great ways to look at musical ideas from Greenberg. Also, he embellishes his lectures with some fun anecdotes, e.g., how Bach gets fired from his job by Prince Leopold of K鰐hen's new wife.
Bach and the High Baroque; Robert Greenberg. Challenging while driving. It is fascinating to go deeper into some musical ideas but I think this might be too difficult (1) with the distractions of the road, (2) without some graphic aids. Get the video version and watch it at home.
Philosophy
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition; various but mostly Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff. Fair to Excellent but mostly Excellent. These 70 lectures cover 3000 years of philosophy sufficiently well that you'll be able to hold your own at an Ivy League cocktail party. You'll also probably be inspired to do a little reading. The main problem with the class is that the two main lecturers are too young (under 40?) and can get on your nerves at times.
Freedom, the Philosophy of Liberation; Dennis Dalton. Winner. A fabulous blend of history, philosophy, and political theory.
Self under Siege; Rick Roderick. Fair. Roderick is presumably popular with college students because of his scorn of bourgeois suburban American life. This can be grating on adult ears. On the other hand, Roderick is very strong on translating abstract philosophies into terms that modern people can understand.
Birth of the Modern Mind; Alan Charles Kors. Excellent. Kors brings the Enlightenment to life, continued in the Mind of the Enlightenment, which is also very good.
Physics
Physics is hard. MIT freshman physics is where I learned that I was stupid.
Cosmic Questions; Robert Kirshner. Winner. Kirshner is at Harvard and listening to him you can understand why hey have such a strong astrophysics program. My astrophyicist friends tell me that they have to be broader than any other physicists in order to combine knowledge from many sources to figure out what goes on out there. Kirshner shows you the process.
Relativity and the Quantum Revolution; Richard Wolfson. Don't try this one in your car. I did and you'd have to pull over every five minutes to inspect a drawing in the booklet and think. Physics is hard; get this on video. The examples are well chosen.
Politics
Dennis Dalton has some of the most interesting perspectives on political theory, illuminating them with philosophy from the Greeks and Indians. His Power Over People class (two parts) is worthwhile, as is Freedom: The Philosophy of Liberation.
Psychology
I have a theory that every Jewish woman on the East Coast is either in therapy or is herself a therapist. Among my friends and their friends, this appears to be true to a first approximation. I'd never taken a "real psych" class in college so this was my chance...
Explaining Social Deviance; Paul Root Wolpe. Fair. Really a sociology course and the best thing about it is that it shows how confused and tentative are the thought processes of sociologists.
Abnormal Psych; Drew Westen. Excellent. Now you won't be overmatched when a friend starts spewing psychobabble to explain your thinking. Explains this Freud guy.
Religion
Comparative Religions; Robert Oden. Winner. You aren't going to make too many friends if you go to an Orthodox dinner and tell people about all the stuff in the Hebrew Bible that was lifted from earlier religious texts, but hey.
Great World Religons; various. Mixed. This is a five-part series. Some of the lectures are almost laughably bad, e.g., John Swanson's Islam. I listened to it with an MIT undergrad and she couldn't believe how many words it took him to say something simple, how much time was wasted in repetition or saying what he was going to say. But you can order the pieces separately. To me the Jewish and Islamic courses were the weakest; Diana Eck's Religions of India the strongest.
Conclusion
Looking back over these reviews, I feel kind of bad for having dissed some of these courses. After all, is it fair for a high school dropout to judge a PhD in humanities? Probably not. However, take these reviews as expressions of what an average engineer can get out of these courses. Someone with a really good liberal arts education would no doubt find more to like in some of them.
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philg@mit.edu
Reader's Comments
Mike Sugrue is an amazing lecturer, both in person and on video. His lectures, however, are meant to be appreciated after reading the respective book. I honestly think that he has read every book in the Western Cannon...he is an awesome intellectual presence. Plus he needs the money.
-- Gregory Bronner, April 16, 1997
I've finished four of Michael Sugrue's tapes. Parts 1 & 2 of Bible & The Western Culture. And Parts 1 & 2 of " lato, Socrates and the Dialogues". Michael Sugrue is brilliant. Is concerned with facts, applicability to todays life. Really makes the texts meaningful for mid-1990's living. I tried one on Rome, with a different lecturer, and couldn't get through it. I'd rather listen to anything by Sugrue than something of interest by someone else.
-- Bob Hangsterfer, May 4, 1997
I recently stumbled across the courses from the Teaching Company, and am very impressed. About 15 years after finishing a thorough technical education in computer science at MIT, I found myself becoming interested in history and philosophy. At first, I read some old books, along with some summaries of the fields. Then, I found the tapes, and they give lots of useful background information, along with informal comments that just don't show up in printed form. So far, I've listened to the Great Minds and part of the Great Authors tapes and think they're great. I especially like Michael Sugrue.
-- Pace Willisson, September 5, 1997
I've taken the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition course. Most of the lectures are good although down the stretch Staloff and Sugrue do all the lecturing. Staloff can get under your nerves a little because he uses a host of words you never hear in everyday conversation and which often render his style impenetrable.
Both lecturers reveal their youth somewhat by often trying to accomplish too much in their lectures and speaking too fast. Nonetheless I like the course and it's breadth. A few "tie-up" lectures at the end might have been nice.
-- Jack Oest, July 14, 1998
I also happen to be an MIT alumnus, and have recently begun listening to Teaching Company tapes while walking to work. Alan Kors: thumbs up. Staloff and Robinson: thumbs down.
-- Brian Fiedler, November 10, 1998
Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality taught by: Professor Robert SapolskyStanford University is an excellent overview of the role that biology plays in our behavior. Sapolsky is an entertaining lecturer and the information in his lectures are an excellent way to develop a background into the exciting and ever-expanding field pf psychobiology.
-- Pamela Rutledge, December 27, 1999
I found the Richard Wolfson course on Einstein's Relativity so interesting that I have watched it multiple times. His presentation is very clear, the examples and demonstrations are very effective and the net result is that you can learn a tremendous amount from this course. Thank you to the Teaching Company for making this wonderful program available.
-- Calvin Schrotenboer, August 27, 2000
People may be interested in 3 series of tapes on Great Books, which were broadcast on CBC radio's program This Morning. The tapes are of discussions between This Morning's host Michael Enright and Dr. Bruce Meyer. There are 5 books discussed in each series with each discussion lasting about 25 min. I really liked them, and they would be great to hear in the car. More information on them, including how to order them, can be obtained from <http://www.cbc.ca/thismorning>the This Morning website.</a>
Best wishes,
Evan
-- Evan Pritchard, March 15, 2001
I really apperciated this page, as it appears to be the only thing online about the Teaching Company at all (apart from their webpage.) I did a search on Google, altavista, go.com all empty handed. Is there any place else to get reviews? I would like to read one about "Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age." by Childers.
-- Ian M, May 7, 2001
Have to disagree with the above comments about Michael Sugrue. I listened to his lectures on Job and Plato in the "Great Authors" series, and found him to be arrogant and condescending--the stereotypical intellectual snob. His analysis of Job had all the depth of a puddle, and his treatment of "myth" in Plato was right off the PBS series. Perhaps it is his youth showing? I have only heard these two lectures, but my son has listened to several others, which he rates the same as these. I buy a lot of these tape series, and love most of them, but I won't buy any more in which Sugrue is the main lecturer.
On the other hand, two lecturers we have found to be excellent (insightful and even-handed) are Phillip Cary and Peter Saccio. We'll buy anything by them without a second thought.
-- Denise Gaskins, June 6, 2001
I recommend The Teaching Company courses to anyone who wants the best in college level courses taught by the best professors. I have bought and enjoyed the Teaching Company courses for the past eight years. I have enjoyed every course and every professor. I have bought about twenty courses. My favorite professors are Michael Sugrue, Princeton; Darren Staloff, William and Mary; Tim Taylor, Macalester College and Peter Saccio, Dartmouth. I appreciate the work The Teaching Company does to work with their customers to provide new courses that are desired by their customers. I checkout the courses before I buy them on the Teaching Company's website www.teach12.com where they provide a comprehensive description of each course.
-- L:ynn Carlson, August 2, 2001
I second the opinion above on the course entitled "Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality" taught by Robert Sapolsky. This was my first Teaching Company course. I wasn't expecting it to be this good and this easy to listen to. But, it was! I listened to it while driving to and from work and actually looked forward to waking up for work the next day so I could listen to more of it. And to think I got this course on sale for $15! Sapolsky is an excellent teacher and easy to listen to. The course outline that comes with the course was a huge help also in reviewing what I just listened to (I am hoping this is the same with all of the courses). Biological psychology is an absolutely fascinating field.
-- Mark Jordan, February 8, 2002
I am a huge fan of the Teaching Company, and wish there were more reader's reviews out there. This is the only site I have found that address the Teaching Company.
I came across the Teaching Company while writing a thesis for an M.A. in Lit. I was pretty bored with literature at that point because in grad school good writing is pretty much reduced to jargon spouting showoffs trying to out do each other.
One day I happened to come across a sample Teaching Company tape of Arnold Weinstein talking about the Sound and the Fury, and since I was doing my thesis on Faulkner I decided to give it a shot. I was fully expecting a stiff cliff's note kind of presentation concerned chiefly with plot overview and a general standard reading of the text. I had come across these kinds of things in the past.
Well, that moment where I popped the tape into my car and began listening is really etched in my mind because I was absolutely glued to the lecture from start to finish. I felt like I was being pulled into the story and presented Faulkner's landscape in a fresh, heartwrenching way. After sitting through hours of meaningless jabber in undergrad and grad school, I started to realize once again why I loved literature. When I found out that The Teaching Company offered not only a whole course by Weinstein, but several, I was in heaven!
After listening to all of Weinstein's courses (yes all of them!) I can only say that he is the most gifted literary critic I have ever come across (and I have listened to many wonderful professors). He seems to effortlessly combine a razor sharp academic mind with a wonderful down to earth sense of the human passion and struggle that lives in and inspires good writing. Every time I listen to Weinstein, I am struck by how such an accomplished academic can effortlessly navigate between the (what can be interesting) academic world of "literary criticism" and the everyday world of human desire and pain that we all inhabit and that generates art in the first place. You never feel like Weinstein is "lecturing", because his elegant, artful style seems more like the poetry he talks about than it does "lecture".
I have listened to other courses from the Teaching Company and I love Robert Hazen's "Joy of Science", King's "Roots of Human Behavior", and Weston's "Abnormal Psychology" course. These are all fantastic, really dazzling courses that were just a real joy to listen to. But as someone who has loved good writing since I could read, Weinstein is the real jewel in the Teaching Company's shimmering group of "Star Teachers".
I must also say a few words about the Teaching Company's customer service. Even if the Teachning Company had poor customer service I wouldn't care because I love the courses so much. But I am consistently impressed with how professional the company is. I always get the courses within two or three days. Everything is beautifully designed and packaged. They have some of the spiffiest catalogs you will come across, and they have a lifetime guarantee on all of their products. I have returned courses in the past without any questions asked. The Teaching Company is just a wonderful company that has only expanded and grown over the years (they now offer courses on Compact Disc and are looking into DVD for the video versions). And they consistently poll their audience on everything from future courses to product casing design. I feel a bit silly praising the company so much (it seems like I am getting paid to say these things!), but they just seem to get everything right.
-- Jeffrey Counts, June 5, 2002
Here are some more reviews, following the above format. So far I have not felt let down by any courses from the Teaching Company. The lecturers are all excited about their material and it shows. I heartily recommend any of the courses below. All of these reviews refer to the audio tape formats.
Comparative Religions; Robert Oden. Winner. Does an excellent job explaining the concepts he covers. My only major complaint was that I wanted more -- the course is a good introduction, but it is clearly just that. I truly would have preferred something along the lines of a 24 or 36 course lecture. His anecdotes (both personal and about historical figures) make listening to the course a real joy.
Science Fiction; Eric Rabkin. Excellent. Fun to listen to, especially for a science fiction reader like myself. I learned a good deal about the history of the genre; also I was pleased to hear him discuss some of the hard science fiction writers (e.g., Hal Clement) that I didn't expect to be covered.
Great Ideas of Philosophy; Daniel N. Robinson. Very Good. I was impressed by the grand scope of material covered in this course. Note: Robinson's use of the phrase "do you see", which he throws in so often it practically replaces the comma, begins to get a bit grating (and remember, this is a 50 lecture course). Also, he occasionally throws in difficult words and references without defining them, making some spots a bit rough for a dummy like me. Despite this, there are quite a number of wonderful lectures in here.
Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality; Robert Sapolsky. Very Good, with fascinating case histories. One problem and major gripe: Sapolsky often refers to figures (sometimes color illustrations) that aren't in the course notes -- and, because of the use to figures, this is one of the very few courses where I even bothered to look at the notes. You'll still be able to follow his discourse, but because it does get frustrating this may be better suited to the video version. (I haven't seen the video course for comparison).
Great Writers: Their Lives and Their Works; John B. Fisher. Very Good. Somewhat mixed lot of lectures. Fisher picks an impossible task: trying to cover both the lives of these dozen writers as well as their great works in only 45 minutes. The result that one if not both really aren't covered in adequate detail. It helps to have a fair amount of familiarity with the writers' works. One bonus is that each lecture is pretty much self-contained, so you needn't listen to the series all at once (or, I suppose, even in order) but save them for long car rides, etc. My favorite in the bunch: Ulysses S. Grant - Those Memorable Memoirs.
Is Anyone Really Normal?: Perspectives on Abnormal Psychology; Drew Weston. Winner - most notably because the lecturer's sense of humor makes it so entertaining. NOTE: Weston speaks very quickly; at first I thought The Teaching Company had made some kind of recording error. I have a dial to adjust playback speed, and even at slowest playback the tape still sounded like it was running too fast! Once you get used to the lecturer's speed, the series becomes immensely enjoyable.
No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life; Robert Solomon. Good. The lecturer speaks in a slow cadence with a particular rythmn, quite a contrast to the "Abnormal Psychology" course to which I had just listened! I learned quite a bit about the ideas (and misconceptions about) the existential philosophers. The course as a whole seemed to lack somewhat in drive, and dragged especially near the end. (I admit, I barely made it through some of the lectures on Sartre.) But hey, when I can go to bed late at night, tired, put on the headphones, begin a half hour lecture titled "Kierkegaard's Existential Dialectic", and stay awake listening right through to the very end -- that must say something positive about the course.
I've also listened to several others beyond those described above, but it just got to be too much to review thm all!  If there's some course you're interested in, feel free to ask for my opinion.
-- Scott Davis, July 2, 2003
Prof. Seth Lerer's The History of the English Language is excellent. Prof. Lerer's examples are interesting and illuminating and the lectures entertaining and easy to follow.
-- bill mason, July 19, 2003
I highly recommend Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning. The content and delivery are excellent and very practical.
I also recommend Classical Mythology. It was a nice mixture of storytelling, history, biography and analysis. I would have liked more stories, but I can always buy a book or two.
On the negative side, The Roots of Human Behavior somehow manages to take what could have been a one-hour National Geographic special and expand it into 16 lectures. You won't learn a thing if you've ever watched an animal show featuring great apes.
-- Alan Freedman, May 28, 2004 |
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发表于 2005-9-12 20:12:56