As much as possible, I like to start my posts with a picture, but I don't really have anything of my own to show right now. Above is a picture of a pendant that my sister "threw together" last month at a jewelry show because she ran out of them, and wanted to have it to trade with another vendor. She already had a few of the heart-shaped bases (she made them herself, ahead of time) so all she had to do was get out some wire, beads, and some tools. It was fascinating to watch her. I remember feeding Sis in her high chair and reading aloud to her when we were kids. Now, I marvel at the things she creates with her hands. She sells these on Etsy and if you're interested, I'll be happy to privately mail you with her contact information.
I'm blogging in the short span of time that it will take for the Emperor to
Warning: non-craft-related content ahead!
School has started, and I've survived another first week. Without lapsing into gory detail, events kept me busy, and this weekend is going to be the same as I polish up an article draft for my tenure file, which is due Monday. Then, between my classes, I need to write a paper from scratch so I can send it to a colleague far enough in advance that he can read it and include it in a formal conference comment. The conference is going to be on September 19 (the same one that I'll abandon after my paper in order to hear the Yarn Harlot hold forth). It's a simple topic and almost nothing has been written about it, but I do need to hew toward a solid scholarly tone for my presentation. I didn't know we'd have a commentator, or I might have said "no" to the invitation to present. A fifteen minute talk on my topic, that I could do in a couple of weeks, but to create a formal paper for comment? Yow. To make this long story short, this has not all occurred in an ideal manner, but I'll do my best to make it work.
Overall, my two large undergraduate sections "feel good" as far as the students are concerned. When you get a class together, sometimes they jell and become a fun, responsive group. Sometimes they sit there like a lump and you can't get them to say anything, and you spend your semester wondering what is going on in their heads. So far, both classes seem a bit fearless in asking questions or responding to mine, and they're laughing at the right places when I make jokes. I hope this continues.
A couple of semesters ago, in one of my really big undergraduate sections, I had a group of students who had all attended the same high school. One was a married couple (so young!), there were some cousins and other friends, but they all sat together. Two of them spent a remarkable amount of class time with their backs to me, yapping with their friends. I did everything I could to stop them, from subtle hints to having my graduate assistant sit right in the middle of their group, but to no avail. In brief, the result was that they decided to get even with me on their student evaluations -- they actually made up fake scenarios wherein I was supposed to have said truly awful stuff to them in front of other students. Several of them uncreatively repeated the same phrases in their comments, such as "she disrespected us." Two of them actually identified themselves in comments that were supposed to be completely anonymous, just to make sure I knew they were punishing me. One answered every question, no matter what it was, with "she has her favorites and everybody knows it." They must have planned ahead and assigned gripes to write. Now, no one who actually works with me believed a word of it and it was regarded by them as downright silly, but the dean expressed concern at my "callousness" in writing. Fast forward to the next year -- I didn't change a thing in how I treated students, but I had no students who created "classroom management issues," as I called them. I received a number of helpful responses in my evaluations, and overall the students said that they thought that I really did care about whether or not they learned something from me. If there was one comment that was repeatedly made, it was "she had real respect for us." Take that, Dean! I feel utterly vindicated.
My favorite student evaluation comments were the ones where there was comment after comment of "we get our papers and test back really fast" or "within a week at most" and then the lone outlier, "she never gives anything back." Then this last semester, there was this one: "She never talked about important things, like the Declaration of Independence." Oops! I spent a whole week on that -- where were you, young man or young woman??
I'd love to be able to really take student evaluations into account when I put my courses together, and when they give me something to work with, I do. But in a world where anonymous customer satisfaction surveys are ubiquitous, a popular subject of comedy, or they're used to retaliate against people who don't sieg heil to unreasonable demands, I have trouble attaching value to them. But get this -- for tenure at my university the most important question on the evaluations, the one on which we are judged the most is "would you recommend this instructor to other students?" Yes, you read that correctly. My future employment does not depend on how well I teach. It does not depend on my efforts as an advisor. It does not depend on my quality as a scholar, or on my service or collegiality, although I have to provide evidence of those things in my tenure file. The reality is my future rests on the results of anonymous customer satisfaction surveys. When, and I do mean when I am tenured, I am going to make it my goal to change that. Let's find a way to measure results meaningfully.
My more experienced colleagues have been fighting this good fight for years, to no avail. One says that it will take someone not getting tenure and suing the university over it to change the system. However, we've had some major changes in administration in the past year and I hope it means that this is something that can be changed.
Rant completed. I promise, next time there will be more craft-related nonsense to report.
Breakfast is ready! Time go eat and then clean up the kitchen!
1 comment:
LOVE that pendant!
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