Sunday, June 9, 2013

Santa Fe Sid Looks Into the Abyss.

I've been assigned to visit one of our part-time faculty. I do this every so often, and I don't mind.

It's a few days away, but I just received via email a link to his RMP evaluations. Yes, the site that shall not be named.

If these were my evals, I'd blow my brains out.

(They've been anonymized a bit to spare the doofus who's proud of them.)

[+]

  • He's the coolest teacher I've ever taken. There is lots of chance to get extra credit.
  • Xxxxxx is so funny and cool. He's layback and chill and you can do bonus work instead of the final.
  • It's like being at a comedy club, but with lots of learning sprinkled in. Xxxxxx gives everyone a good show!
  • I learned so much from Mr. Xxxxxx. He's the greatest. Sprawling Awful Junior College should hire a whole bunch of guys like him.
  • He's great and easy professor. He tells all kinds of great stories.
  • He is so funny and easy. Just print our the powerpoint slides.
  • He goes off on tangents about his friends and TV shows. He's always so funny.
  • He's a great teacher, or edutainer, as he says!



17 comments:

  1. The fact that even HE says "edutainer" is reason for you to take Strelnikov along with you to the eval.

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  2. Ooh, comedy plus sprinkles! Did he get his degree from Clown College?

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  3. Sid said, "If these were my evals, I'd blow my brains out."

    So might the proffie, if those were his evals. But they're not his evals.

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  4. "Edutainment".
    People write entire books about this shit:
    http://www.amazon.com/They-Snooze-You-Lose-Presentations/dp/0470902906/

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, MA.

      Morbid curiosity (and a good relationship with the library)led me to order that, just to see how bad it is....

      Delete
  5. A great idea for a new college. "Sesame University," for when you've learned all you can from "Sesame Street."

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    1. That's no joke. During one of the many sessions I had with my last department head and the ADH, in which they had to remind me of how bad an instructor I was, I blurted out in frustration whether I should resort to Bert and Ernie imitations during my lectures. I was told something like "Whatever it takes."

      I thought they were joking. They weren't.

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    2. NLAA, you made me choke on my compliment sandwich!

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  6. He's an adjunct? Most adjuncts keep their jobs only if their evals stay really high. Most adjuncts water their classes down and relax their standards to do so. He could be ashamed of those evaluations too. If he's not an adjunct, I take it back.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not sure this is true of "most" adjuncts (but admittedly I may be looking at things from a relatively privileged viewpoint; evals matter at my university, but my department has a more multi-faceted approach to evaluating faculty, including adjuncts). But it's a real danger, both because evals actually matter at a lot of schools, and because of the perception (by teachers, and sometimes by students) that they matter. I suppose even RMP evals matter if one is worried about one's sections filling, but for the most part I don't think that's a major issues these days of budget cuts (most places I know of, there are just enough seats for the demand, or a few to many fewer seats than the demand warrants -- in fact, the need to create more seats in intro courses is one of the excuses for MOOCs in some places).

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    2. Evals are definitely an issue at my institution. I'm on a hiring committee for a new lecturer in our department and the chair of the committee specifically excluded a very promising (on paper, anyway) candidate with glowing letters of recommendation because the RMP "evals" for that person were bad. As in, students were complaining about this person's classes being too hard and that they were forced to actually do work and it was just too hard.

      I'm also a lecturer and while I do hold my students to pretty high standards and incorporate research based pedagogies into my teaching wherever I can, I'm always aware that I can't piss them off too much if I want to keep my job. It's a very thin edge to balance on and it was even worse back in the days when I was an adjunct.

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    3. It's amazing how many people don't even consider that the RMP "evals" are oftentimes written by the proffies themselves or, on the other hand, by the proffies' angry ex-boyfriends.

      Maybe I should ask my doting--and very creative--mother to write a glowing "eval" for me a few times each week. It might result in a higher salary for me, and it would give her something to do.

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    4. Bubba, I know someone who claimed to do this to an ex. Hell hath no fury, and all that......

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  7. He's absolutely positively excellent because he's creating a "safe" learning environment in which the students are "comfortable". They will learn just so much from him, won't they? (Yeah, right.)

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  8. Sid said, "If these were my evals, I'd blow my brains out."

    A better solution might be to blow out the brains (if any) belonging to the subject of the evals. That would automatically raise the level of instruction in your department.

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  9. Well, the good news is that he's not being evaluated only by student comments (official or unofficial). The bad news for you, as the reviewer, is that you may be in the position of saying "this course isn't rigorous enough to meet our standards" (it would actually be easier to review someone who had poor or mixed official evals, but was clearly maintaining rigor; in that case, you get to be on the side of the faculty member *and* the side of the angels, which is more pleasant).

    I hope he also sends some real course materials. And I hope they turn out to be better than expected.

    P.S. I've always hated the covers to Ken Bain's _What the Best College Teachers Do_ (particularly this one, because they seem to embody the idea of professor as edutainer (male edutainer, at that; I realize the book is written by a man, but it would have been nice to fit an image of a female professor somewhere on the cover, even the back). The book may be a fine one, for all I know (I own it, so I guess the publisher is happy); I have trouble getting past the cover.

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