Monday education blues

Mondays tend to be a depressing day, and to make it worse today is gray, rainy (a good thing), and an exam is scheduled this morning in one of my classes. Why should a professor be depressed about giving an exam? Think about what are the students feeling? Ah, yes. It is depressing because after so many years of the same pattern, you know exactly what to expect, you just don't know who will do well and who will demonstrate that they are just not yet ready for advanced classes. Actually most of the class will do well enough, and those a bit disappointed will adjust their approach and perform better from now on with the result that 70-80% of the class will probably get Bs and As, which is not unexpected from upper class majors. However in recent years my class has attracted a 5 to 10 transfer students who having just completed junior college have transferred to the university level. Half of these will do fine, but the other half will prove they are not ready having not progressed much beyond the high school level in terms of study skills, work ethic, and educational expectations. They are the ones who aren't taking notes during a discussion because they have been trained to disregard any material that does not easily conform to multiple choice examination questions. Sadly for them, such questions are not on my exams, and when confronted with blank paper, even when a soothing pastel colored blankness, upon which they are to relate their understanding of a discussion that they failed to take any notes about, they are at a loss. "It's not in the textbook." Ah, an insight, finally! Yes, correct, you have an instructor who does not need a textbook to teach and who does not teach the textbook. Although not an issue as yet in Lincolnland, the dismantling of public education continues apace especially under the guidance of GnOPe governors, like the ones in Florida and Texas, and like the educational amateurs they are, their reforms are recipes for pandering. The reason some students arrive at university from junior colleges unready is that too much attention is paid to student satisfaction in evaluating faculty performance, part of the "education should be run as a business" attitude. But learning isn't always easy, or fun, and doesn't always yield top grades. The Phactor learned more from one SOB than almost any other professor he encountered, but it took me 10 years and a lot more sophistication to realize that and any evaluations of his teaching effectiveness back then would have generated outrage and scorn. He didn't care actuallyabout whether you liked him or not, part of his charm, or whether you liked what he was doing, but only if you learned. And it wasn't easy, or fun, although having a real-life blond cheerleader in your study group had its moments, but we did learn, and this guy was so far ahead of the educational curve most science teachers have yet to catch up to him. And when finally the Phactor figured this out, it was awe-inspiring. So, having amateurs decide how you do your job is not good business practice, but there we go. And as the papers are being turned in, you know how disappointing some of them will be, so you have to remind yourself that no amount of your effort can help them all achieve, but at some future time, some of them may credit you for a job well done, even if you didn't teach the textbook.

Student Evaluations - Yawn.

Last semester's teaching evaluations arrived yesterday and the Phactor filed them, unread, along with all the rest. You see, student evaluations of my teaching have been drearily similar semester to semester for years, and the whiny tone with which students complain is always depressing. My courses demand considerable effort, and student effort, ranging across a couple of orders of magnitude is the single biggest determinate of success, both now and in the future. Hard-working students find my classes easy enough, but slackers hang themselves with the all too ample rope provided. So as you might easily guess, my student evaluations are a mixed bag that generally parallels the diverse work-ethics of the students in my classes. As opposed to current students, enough feedback returns from students from one to ten years post-graduation saying that while my classes were hard in the effort required sense, they found themselves very well prepared and found my classes' usefulness enduring. That's more than enough justification for ignoring recent whines.
So imagine what someone has discovered? ""Hard" instructors seem to do better at preparing students for upper-level work, even though the grades may be lower and student-evaluation scores weaker in those classes." Duh! And guess who the "hard" instructors were? Oh yeah, permanent senior faculty who aren't worried about evaluations deciding their future employment! Fortunately my bosses have never placed an over reliance on student evaluations, but at institutions where student evaluations reign supreme you select for easy, sometimes even pandering instructors, except for some very very few faculty who can be both hard and popular. This is the great failing of junior colleges; faculty careers live or die based upon whether you please your students. Lincolnland has a great many junior colleges and their graduates show up in my classes as 3d year students, and about 50% still have poor study skills and poor work ethics, so they sort themselves out quickly even though most sport quite good grade averages from their junior college. This is also a failing at uber-elite institutions where you cannot fail. Give an uber-elite student for whom admission was their last academic hurdle a C, even for no effort at all, and mommy & daddy dearest who pay that awesome tuition initiate the cascade of complaint that ends up with a dressing down of the presumptuous faculty member, who had better have tenure. At our great public institutions students are free to fail, and that's why the grades of our top students actually mean something. Oh, even our institution has it's soft underbelly of disgraceful grading (8 out of every 10 students in every single course in music get As!). Sure, never a sour note. Unfortunately our current provost would be better suited for work at a junior college, so one must always be on guard. One day all of that paper filed away will be recycled as garden mulch and smart money says the plants will grow great.

Another fine semester shot to hell

As they say about flying, any landing you can walk away from was successful, so this was a successful semester. There will still be a few loose ends: a senior who wants to use all too familiar excuses in lieu of accomplishments. The day or two following a semester can be eerie on a college campus; the quiet, the emptiness. A quad that was bustling with people just a day ago is totally deserted, and if you don’t have some gizmo stuck in your ear or buzzing in your pocket, the quiet provides you with an opportunity for reflective thought, a dying art in an era of short attention spans, mobile distractions, and jingoism discourse. Where are thoughtful young people going to come from? Even in the university thought seems at a premium, and so my thoughts turned to a student commentator who opined that student evaluations of “teachers” were a sham because no matter how “bad” the evaluation the faculty never got fired. Indeed, what of student evaluations in this day and age? Speaking from a great deal of experience, you learn a lot about what students like and don’t like, but very little about what was effective teaching. After all, what do students know of teaching or learning? Do we ask students what was effective some 5 or 10 years post graduation? No, let’s get an opinion right now while those labor-intensive assignments are still fresh in their minds and they have yet to see what success in the real world is all about. And if you are one of those reviled professors, was it because you made them think, and it was hard, like really, really hard? Many moons ago my fate was intertwined with a senior colleague in a team-taught course, and his pandering, his lite-weight coverage of the subject, and his easy exams were shocking , and his teaching evaluations were sky high while mine languished at merely average. And he taught what seemed to be the behavior of baby zoo animals while genetics and evolution were left for me. Cute vs. dihybrid crosses, easy vs. hard, fluff vs. basic biology; clearly a no win situation when the scale is based on student likes and dislikes. In subsequent years, when partnered with another member of the faculty, my teaching evaluations instantly jumped over 1.5 points on a 5 point scale without changing a thing except the basis for comparison. So what do really high teaching evaluations tell you? And thus my expectations for teaching accolades are modest, and the grand thing is that they do not matter at all at this time of year when quiet reigns.