"Needs Improvement"
Instead of doing professor evaluations at the end of the semester, I think we should give fellow student evaluations. The professors are tenured and set in their ways for the most part. I have no illusions that my writing “This professor’s lectures are disorganized and he regularly tells students they are stupid if they cannot answer his questions” will have any effect whatsoever. But there are some students here who desperately need to be told exactly why they are so annoying and how they can improve. So, in the spirit of the end of the semester, I hereby open my comments for your fellow student evaluations.
Labels: 30K per year for this?, Haaaaate
posted by katze @ 1:05 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Nuts, I'm not teaching this semester! Can I just say for the record that I totally took my student evals WAY TOO SERIOUSLY? I was full of self loathing when a couple of kids said that "she grades way too hard." Then one day I got an eval that said "Megarita doesn't 'get' my various writerly tones." Then I thought, you, little boy, are a tool and don't have one voice just many squeaking annoyances that you pass off as poetry. And then I no longer cared. This is how professors go bad.
you can start by being a little nicer to your fellow classmates. it works for me with my annoying co-workers.
stop judging and start accepting. it will make your life alot easier when you stop making it a priority to find faults in others.
Believe it or not, those student evaluations do have an effect, even if the prof is tenured. The student evaluations are taken pretty seriously when it comes time to give merit raises...
Luneray
it occurs to me that arguing for the sake of arguing can be annoying. vesna...........
Megarita--
If I had TAs, I would be less cynical about the evaluations. I remember how seriously the other TAs in the grad department took their evals, and I also remember the tears that accompanied the harsh evaluations and the soaring feeling that accompanied the good ones when I taught. It's the tenured profs who seem to have the attitude that if you don't like the way they teach, you are just a squeaking annoyance (to borrow your phrase) that make me feel utterly apathetic and cynical when the whole process happens every semester.
Luneray--
I don't care about pay raises and I don't want to see someone fired or anything. I just want to see some improvement in the classroom behavior and pedagogic techniques from these professors who I am paying a pretty penny to learn from, but who are not teaching-- they're lecturing (best case) or just blathering on in an self-important manner (not-so-great case) or even giving factually incorrect speeches (hello, Professor Strap!). I resent that.
And as for our good friend anonynmous: if you want to criticize, sign your name. To do otherwise robs your message of any possible credibility, as does the self-righteous tone of your comment. You might also take note of the fact that this is *my* blog and if I choose to use it to "[make] it a priority to find faults in others", well, that's my perogative. You might also consider that this is a spot in which I can (and do) rant about the things that bother me. One of those things are the people who are not run-of-the-mill annoying, but full-on moronic. If you came here looking for niceness and sugar and spice, you are in the wrong store. If you want to rant about how life would be so much better if stupid people like me would just stop exercising their better judgement and start accepting whatever the others around them spew out, get your own blog. If you want to use my space to rant about it, start signing your name.
Off topic...holy flan you're blog is so very green now!
Don't look at it in IE. I don't look at the colors in IE. Use Mozilla. It's healthier anyway.
er...that was in firefox. I'm just saying it's very green. Of course now I have to see what it looks like in IE
:)
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