Evaluation

When I drove up to the house this afternoon I saw my husband inside the garage chucking a piece of lumbar at the wall. Apparently we still have a mouse problem.

We are headed to Arizona tomorrow for Christmas, so today is a day of trying to get everything finished. It's not going well. I did get a chance to read all the course evaluations for this past semester. I oversee 14 sections of one class (yep, entering the grades for that one has been a blast) and then have four sections of my own I taught.

In general, I get good feedback from course evaluations and really look forward to reading them. I did have one student who I apparently turned off because I did get these comments:

"very intense, very harsh."

"Make the class easier, sheesh, we already have 15 other hours of actual work to do, don't have time to read all the asignments. Don't yell at your class please."

I feel like I can pretty much guess that I had one disgruntled student this semester based on these comments and I have to laugh because I can clearly remember the day I showed up to class and found that no one had completed the assigned reading. Which makes it really difficult to conduct an interactive discussion about the reading.

I went to the school of education office next door and got a roll of adding machine tape. I had the students hold onto the tape and give one reason why getting a college education was important. Then they held onto their portion of the tape and tossed the roll to another student. At the end of this there was a web of adding machine tape connecting all the students.

I put a folder on top of the web and told them that that folder represented the need for contribution into an academic community in order to have a successful liberal arts education.

Then I asked the students to give one reason why they hadn't shown up for class prepared. As they gave their excuse they dropped their part of the adding machine paper. It only took a few excuses before the folder dropped to the ground.

I explained that they were active participants in their own education and that by not showing up to class prepared they were actually damaging the community and themselves. I told them to leave the classroom and go complete their reading.

So, yep, this 'ol meanie instructor was very intense, very harsh, and did yell at her class. And I'm not particularly remorseful.

But so you don't think I'm all mean as an instructor, here's some of the good stuff they said:

"Every class in general was very positive. I went to that class and felt loved. And learned life lessons and other helpful things."

"There isn't much that can make this class better. This was my favorite class."

So there. I suppose I should go home and see if we have a dead mouse in the garage yet!