Student comments
As the semester winds down it’s the season for student reviews of classes. I never really saw the point of this, especially in introductory classes like calculus. The time to ask students about the class is a year or so later. In the moment students have no idea what makes a good or a bad teacher, and generally what they think is good (easy grading) is bad for them.
That said, there’s something to be gained from student reviews, and this guy has collected some of the best over his years of teaching. I’d say I planned to do the same, but as it stands it doesn’t look like I have any years of teaching to look forward to. Still, enjoy.
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I’m inclined to agree with you. I firmly believe that at the time student course evaluations are handed out, students are really in no position to judge their professors. There are better assessment methods, but student course evaluations are probably the easiest to implement.
Sites like ratemyprofessor.com just turn my stomach. Ewww.
You know what would be a nice evaluation? Asking students who add the major why they’re doing it. I’m pretty sure I’d be taken more seriously by teaching-heavy schools if they saw the dozen-plus students who have added the math major after my calc 3 course.
But there I go griping again.
Why don’t you have any years to look forward to?
Not only would I agree with you guys on student evaluations, but I would go one step further and call them nothing more than just a byproduct of crass departmental politics. All it is is popularity with the students and so is nothing more than a really cheap measure of how much people like your department or something. But, people don’t pick a college or a major based on how popular their teachers are. They pick colleges that have lots of prestige and majors that are valued independently of the university or professor. You guys shoul dbe giving this evaluation to the future employers of your students not the students, themselves. It’s ridiculous.
I hated “sei” forms when I was a graduate student. In retrospect, it was just a way for people that should have been weeded out by the qualifying exams to hang around and suck up summer teaching money from those of us that could pass the qualifiers. And, something like that is a pretty big deal on a graduate student’s stipend. Most of these guys would just go off into something else anyway like physics or even get their MBA of all things. Meanwhile, someone like me that was a good student, that passed the quals, but that only had a slightly better than 3 out of 5 on the sei when the departmental average is something like 4.2 has to make do with summer fellowships (significantly less than an assitantship). And, all just because I take homework seriously and don’t just feed exam questions to my students while the popular TAs are off giving away the recitation grade and just prepping their students for the exams.
(Anyway, just my belligerent two cents on the matter.)
I might not have any teaching years to look forward to because it doesn’t look like I’m getting a job this year. Yale has been generous to allow me to stay on this one year, but that’s not an option for next year. Without an academic job I’ll be cast into the outer darkness and it will become even more difficult to claw my way back in. So it goes.
Anyhow, I know students don’t pick their major based on popularity of the teacher. I’m surely not the most popular calculus instructor here. I don’t hold review session parties like at least one other does. I make it clear that I’m not there to make the students pass, but just to present the material, hopefully in a way they can find accessible. If students decided to major in mathematics because of popular teaching styles, I’d be a washout on that count.
But what my track record shows is that I consistently manage to show enough of what glimmers behind the calcified wall of the calculus to interest my students. A number of them each time go on to take more math courses than they otherwise might have. Some add a math minor to an econ (very popular) or molecular biology (”pre-med”, also very popular) major. A select handful actually switch into the math major after my class. I don’t know exactly what I do, but whatever it is it tends to make some students want to know more.
I think that students ‘judge’ their lecturers in terms of which lecturer’s style suits the students learning method. I think they do have their uses, because you don’t always have to write ‘bad’ things. I mean some students do take the mick, but a little ‘constructive criticism’ can’t harm anyone.
Although I do agree that teaching upto 300 students will obviously produce a variety of responses. I think it’s a good way to let certain lecturers know that you think they’re cool and fantastic lecturers. And speaking for myself, I think the one thing I ‘dislike’ is when the lecturer is there for the sake of it so to speak.
[erm don't know whether anything I've written has made much sense!]