Sweet. The only question is whether the person calling you knew beforehand that they hadn't told you, but wanted to make you reflexively shoulder the blame.
How awful. In the same vein, my friend misread the starting day of the semester last summer and missed the first class. Upon realizing this, she went online and misread the meeting time, and missed the second class too. (She was the teacher.)
Dude, that was a dream, right? Because I've had that one, too.
Remember the one person for 80 hours vs. two for 40 discussion? Having several people in the office means never having to say it was your fault. "I thought *she* sent you the revision." All things considered, I taught pretty well.
Yeah, well, let's see how your students' attendance looks in a few weeks.
One semester my class time was mis-posted on the department list. It took us (me and the administrator in charge of graduate student teaching) quite a while to realize that it was the time that was wrong, not the room location.
My first semester of grad school, I slept through a discussion session I was supposed to hold, and ran to school in tears. (I was fragile, so what.) I ran smack into the chair of our department.
He comforted me by relating the time he forgot he was supposed to give a *final exam*. They called him in his office. He mentally prepared the exam on the walk over, and wrote it on the board.
I've done that kind of thing too. IMHO, in the States (where I completely missed a class), students find it amusing when you confess the next day, and recognize that you, too, are only human. In Canada, they *seem* amused when you confess the next day, but then bitch about your lack of professionalism on the evals.
BTW, in Canada, I didn't miss the class--I was about 20 minutes late, and the few students who remained and I had a really good workshop session instead of the class I'd planned.
I brought the students donuts the next day. I balanced them on my bike handles on the way to school.
Yeah, you would. Passive-aggressive, mendacious little wankers.
I had a math class as an undergrad where the teacher didn't show up the first day at all, then showed up 75% of the way through the scheduled time for the second day of class, and went into a tirade about how he didn't want to teach the class and the school had told him that he wouldn't have to, but they changed their mind at the last second and it was a bunch of crap about which he was not happy.
And that he had to go to a math conference the next week, so the class would be rescheduled to 4:30-6pm tomorrow (a time during which holding classes was prohibited by the school).
I dropped it.
See? A much better way of doing things.
I think this is an automatic denial of tenure scenario, according to the AAUP.
Tenure is so scary. A friend's advisor just got turned down for tenure. Yikes.
I clicked it and still wasn't sure if I got the joke or not. I guess I did.
And when you did get to class, you were in your underwear, right? I've had similar dreams too.
20, I always keep my underwear on during class.
still wasn't sure if I got the joke
I'm really sorry, heebie, this is, afaik, my only even slightly sadistic trait: I sometimes like to say something made-up in an authoritative way to see whether people will buy it or not. I'm really ashamed of how much it amuses me.
I'm sorry too, SB. I'll go sit in the corner now.
22: You know, researchers in South Carolina have trained oysters to do simple household tasks.
Yeah, you would. Passive-aggressive, mendacious little wankers.
I can't tell if you're joking. I always thought the course eval was exactly the time to tell the teacher what I thought worked well and what was frustrating about the course. When else are you supposed to do it?
(N.b. I was a night student and office hours were not an option.)
I would never have given up on a teacher after just 20 minutes, though. Geeze. That's why you carry work in your backpack, or learn to daydream.
Slol, coupled with my extreme gullability, this is a very bad combination.
Classic example, age 6 or so: Brother Geebie tells me that the bottom of the pool smells like roses...think that one through.
Vous avez mal épelé « ouanqueur ».
God, and I've offended Éner, too. I feel really bad. Or maybe I want to say, >, Frenchy.
Self-pwned. I meant, <<mordez-moi>>.
Follow the self-improvement advice in the link: You click? Edit you.
24: It is, actually. But there's a difference between a frankly acknowledged error, which everyone laughs over, showing up months later on an eval as evidence of someone's unprofessional demanor, and ongoing unprofessionalism (which students should actually address with the prof and/or the department chair) or constructive remarks like "I found the reading list hard to keep up with" or "your habit of arriving to class a little late was annoying."
In other words, I'm exaggerating, but I do dislike it when students don't address things that bother them *during the semester* when there's actually a chance to do something about it.
Deep down, I just want students to stroke my ego in teaching evaluations.
I keep it in check, of course.
I actually really want feedback on the course and what they liked, what they learned from, and what they'd like to do more (or less) with. Alas, my current university doesn't let profs administer their own evals, so you can't actually *tell* the students that when they do 'em. Which means they operate under the common misperception that the best use of evals is to either talk about your personal feelings towards the prof.
If it's any consolation to you, B, I had a similar experience with a student eval out in your beloved Pacific time zone of America: I went to give a talk overseas in the first week of class (which is a legitimate, professional absence) and a student (admittedly only one) complained about it on the evaluation fifteen weeks later.
Now that I think about it, that person was probably a Canadian mole.
the best use of evals is to either talk about your personal feelings towards the prof.
Doo nut keep me een zee suspense.
I'm still cringing over a really nasty eval I wrote for a professor in law school. Yes, he was kind of full of himself, but he didn't deserve the blast I gave him.
Course evaluations are official documents. The departmental bureaucracy hangs onto them, not the teacher. If positive or neutral or constructive, they help the teacher improve the course. If negative, they are used to bury a teacher who's already in trouble for some other reason. Positive evaluations are ignored in most internal staffing decisions.
Slol, one might suspect you of being a Canadian, what with this "yeah, but you guys are just as bad!" attitude....
Seriously, I know that students everywhere do this sort of thing. I just had a beef with the way evals were done at my old school, and I enjoy sweeping nationalistic generalizations. Many of my best friends there are Canadians, though.
After the first test, I ask them:
1. What works about this class?
2. What doesn't work about this class?
and then have a group discussion before they write their answers. These questions are rigged to keep the focus on stuff I might change about the class, unlike the university's end of semester evals. The end of semester evaluations evoke just personal feelings, like B said.
Alas, my current university doesn't let profs administer their own evals, so you can't actually *tell* the students that when they do 'em.
I vaguely recall one professor who handed out her own course eval sheet at the same time as the university's. I remember being outraged by the evidence that the university was apparently not treating its employees professionally. I may even have complained about it on their course eval. (As in: If your system for informing professors about these results is failing to the extent that they're doing their own evaluations with similar questions, that is pathetic.)
I usually wrote essays. There was never enough room. And it was a terrible form. URRRrrgggh, this is bringing back all sorts of maddingly impotent memories. I mean, memories of being maddened by my own impotence.
I always wondered if anything ever actually got improved.
Yeah, but there's still a difference between doing that kind of mid-semester eval (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong) and doing it at the end of the semester, when (hopefully) students have come to realize that some of the shit they objected to did, in the end, really help them learn something.
If negative, they are used to bury a teacher who's already in trouble for some other reason. Positive evaluations are ignored in most internal staffing decisions.
Good God, this is exactly what I hated about those forms. The idea that an evaluation could possibly be "positive" or "negative" -- we're not in second grade, people! This is not a likeability contest!
Some of my best professors were people I didn't like that much. So what. I wrote course evals that provided my opinion on what I thought worked well about the course and how I would change it for the better. If I thought the course should be torpedoed, I said that too. With substantive reasons.
(Not yelling at you, JM. Just the entire mentality, from classmates and faculty alike.)
This is not a likeability contest!
Umm, you are familiar with RateMyProfessors and the research on it, aren't you?
44: Heard of it, never looked at it. I think it emerged towards the end of my college years.
What does the research have to say?
There's at least one paper showing suspicious correlations between perceived "hotness" and high scores on other factors; I have a dim memory of some qualitative interviews being done to determine what students meant by "hotness" -- it wasn't per se "hotness," actually, it was closer to perceived likability.
46: OK, I'm officially confused. The culture that defines a course evaluation as something that *can* be a postive/negative evaluation of the professor as a person (by attractiveness or amiability or whatever) is a problem. Sites like RMP are adding fuel to the fire. The fact that those sites exist is not an argument for doing evaluations in that manner.
Or am I misreading this thread completely, and the people here are saying that they like having course evaluations that focus on instructors' personalities rather than content and format of the material? That wasn't what I thought B was saying.
I'd rather have totally arbitrary, personalised, and meaningless evaluations in the official file and the carefully considered feedback in some other, more useful form that can't come back around to bite the teacher in the ass.
BTW, when the Unabomber was caught, the rumor going around was that the student evaluations from his time teaching math at Berkeley had totally pegged him.
Sure, but if the Unabomber had looked like this, his evaluations would have been well off the mark.
50: But on a more serious note: Huh. I remember a few freshman-level courses that were taught by a long parade of instructors, never the same person from semester to semester.
When I did evaluations of a course like that, I often commented on structural issues -- "Reading six books in six weeks does not allow the class discussion to get beyond consideration of A, B, and C. If this class were held 90 minutes twice a week, it would allow the professor to focus on the first half of the book one night, and the second half the other night. Or discussion of XYZ issues one night and ABC the other. If it is going to stay a weekly, 3-hour class, students' ability to meaningfully digest the material is seriously limited for reasons 1, 2, 3, and I recommend that only 4 books be assigned...." blah blah blah.
I don't know anything about the inner workings of academic departments. If a comment like that was read at all, could it come back to bite the instructor, given that the instructor was handed the syllabus and told to teach it?
The issue is less what we ourselves did or do on evals than the larger problem of how evals are presented to students--which too often is with no explanation whatsoever of what they're for, how they get used, or what it is that the professor/department/college is looking for. Students by and large really aren't vindictive assholes, and they'll give astonishingly helpful advice. It's just that we so seldom ask for that, or explain to them *how* to articulate their feedback in ways that we can understand and use.
The issue is...how evals are presented to students--which too often is with no explanation whatsoever of what they're for, how they get used, or what it is that the professor/department/college is looking for.
Boy howdy, are you right.
54.--An evaluation like that might be useful to the department since they're supposed to be tinkering with standard courses. I doubt that is the sort of comment that would come back around to wound a teacher's prospects.
Now, if the instructor designed the course, and if the evaluations were consistently critical of the course structure, [and other factors relating to publication records and departmental politics] then the set of evaluations might be used as a prop at a tenure review.
I suspect (but do not know: see 55) that evals are effectively neutral in tenure decisions, unless someone really wants to sink a person, in which case you can always dig up shit. I'm sure that at some schools, consistently good or consistently bad evals might make a small difference, but that's about it. And consistently good ones can be interpreted negatively, as showing that a professor is too easy, or cares too much about popularity, or whatever. (Which is sometimes true.)
The people I really worry about are the adjuncts.
Canadian molé? Shouldn't that be in the sauce and oatmeal thread?
slolernr is totally likable
I could never live up to this billing, Becks. But you're awfully kind.
Also, I clearly should have gone to that party.
55: How many students understand enough about how courses are supposed to work to give valuable feedback? (Not snarky, curious.)
How many students understand enough
The majority. Within limits: i.e., if they've seen a range of professors and teachers, they can say quite useful things about teching styles and techniques. Of course they'll say things that are basically designed to make the professor bear more of the learning burden -- "put your lecture notes on the web" being a favorite.
But often a batch of evaluations will supply useful information, as when a large number of pupils share a consensus that lecture x worked well or that lecture y did not.
More pressingly, "new location"? Does this mean "new job"?
Yeah, Labs, tell us everything. Right here on teh internets.
Labs' school is just taking its act on the road.
65: Interesting. I don't remember much about what I wrote in teacher evaluations (other than the one scathing one), but I do remember enough of my own ignorance of the world to doubt that they were very useful. OTOH I tend not to be very charitable toward my younger self.
I've defended a university in lawsuits based on denial of tenure. Bad evals are definitely useful as evidence . . . but minor compared to all the other stuff you'd find in someone's file.
69: Ah, but you shouldn't underestimate our ability to interpret undergraduate prose.
The prose wouldn't have been the major problem. There has to be something there to interpret.
A few years of reading freshman papers gets you over that misconception right quick.
I would never have given up on a teacher after just 20 minutes, though. Geeze. That's why you carry work in your backpack, or learn to daydream.
Are you kidding me? I'd last five or ten minutes, but I'd be heading out to go get coffee after that.
I wrote prose... I wrote prose...
Up at which my lit professor turned her nose.
And speaking of unwelcome things, my wife came home from the store tonight and informed me that there's times that you just shouldn't hit on a woman. Like when she's standing in the feminine products aisle holding a large box of pads.
I laughed myself silly.
What's the problem? "You're fertile, and I'm not squeamish." I'm in the feminine products aisle right now.
ogged has a good attitude about menstruation.
About, towards, in, around, upon, whatever.
It could also mean "I'm into blood."
I was gonna make a hanky code reference with respect to 80 and leverage my faggy upbringing, but... WTF, the Canonical Hanky Code List doesn't have bloodsports? Fuck you, too, Elf. Just because bloodsports is usually a dyke thing is no reason for you to be parochial.
69: I do remember enough of my own ignorance of the world to doubt that they were very useful.
Sure they were. When I was a student and ignorant, I could tell if I was getting less so, and later when I was attempting to do the enlightening I could tell from the evals and class interactions if I was getting across.
I didn't pay much attention to the outliers 'cause there's always a few who can't and never will get it and always a few courtiers-in-training. The rest give you a pretty good idea of what's going on unless you're into serious I've-got-a-new-Ph.D.-and-you-don't denial.
I've always hated doing evaluations, feeling that they were asking for judgments I wasn't prepared to make and was too close to the experience to trust anyway. Of course some instructors made learning a more pleasant experience than others, but isn't that a pretty subjective thing, depending on my mood and receptivity, and the subject matter itself? It always seemed literally impertinent to me, and the firm opinions of my classmates about how their classes were being taught used to annoy me. I'll admit to always having had a guarded and suspicious attitude toward teachers, and having always tried to minimize contact with them.
researchers in South Carolina have trained oysters to do simple household tasks.
Now we're teachin' 'em to play football.
64: How many students understand enough about how courses are supposed to work to give valuable feedback?
Disagreeing with 65 here, not that much (at least in predominantly freshman math classes, which are what I teach). They can offer superficial advice -- talk louder, speak more clearly, improve your blackboard skills, that sort of thing, which is useful -- but they're usually so dang limited in their vision that that's about where it ends. [And that's assuming you even get a coherent set of responses, which is itself pretty rare.] The real problems of effectively communicating the material and the discipline required to master it, forget about it.
Plus, evals clearly track with grades in ways they oughtn't. Also, perceived hottness (and yes, there was a study on that at Arizona, IIRC).
I'm not saying student evals are inherently worthless, but whoever noted upthread that they're not given enough instruction on how to complete the evals -- let alone having the perspective to appreciate the broader goals of the class -- is bang on.
