Just got an email from BYU saying that they couldn't help but notice that my student evaluations have been getting better and better and would I mind telling them what I've been doing to make such a marked improvement so that they can use the information to help other professors?
I don't know if I should be 1) flattered that they think I might know a thing or two about teaching. OR 2) disturbed that my ratings used to be so bad that they were all alarmed at how much I've improved.
(I'm feeling a bit of both, honestly.)
5 comments:
Hmmm...definitely two ways to look at that alright. I hope the flattered feeling triumphs.
I would take the view that you were good at doing it in the first place (if you weren't they would've told you before now!) and now you've taken the quality to an even greater level which is why contacted you for your advice.
Nothing like a good back handed compliment to leave you feeling confused and dissatisfied! Come on, you know you're awesome!
The only problem, Mark, is that they *have* told me that I sucked! They used to make me write essays about my poor performance and what I was going to do to change it! I guess this latest request is at least better than that! :-)
WHOA! they make teachers with bad student evals do that? That made my day. I sure hope I made my physics teacher write a novel. I wrote him a really really bad evaluation. I gave you a pretty good evaluation as I recall.
It would be very interesting to see what kind of correlations you could find to eval scores. For instance, this year we all procrastinated, eh? I wonder if your evals will be higher or lower because of that? Or you could experiment and do ridicules things like make them humiliate themselves, oh wait you already do that.
It must be fascinating to be a teacher and screw with your students and see how that affects them and your evaluations.
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