Teaching evaluations

I just got my teaching evaluations back from last spring, and I'm relieved to say that they were very positive. Phew! I've given some pretty nasty evaluations myself in the past, which I now feel ashamed of. If I get negative reviews in the future, I hope to be able to take them in stride, like the professors in the video below. Perhaps you've seen the Jimmy Kimmel segments of celebrities reading meaning tweets about themselves? Here is (Canadian) "Professors Read Mean Reviews About Themselves":

Jokes aside, the teaching evaluations helped me understand better what students do care about. They like it when their professor seems organized, responds to emails or is willing to make appointments outside of official office hours. They like it when the professor is willing to entertain their (sometimes ridiculous) ideas and at least appears to be enthused about the subject matter.

These things seem separate to me from what I used to think was most important: mastery of content. My greatest fear used to be that students would ask me questions and I would give the wrong answer, or have no idea what to say. I've learned more about my field, so I feel more confident, and I've also learned that students don't mind when I say, "Here's my first response, but I may revise it upon further thought and better research."

I wish someone had told me earlier that so much of successful college teaching is not necessarily about the information. It's about writing a well-paced syllabus that you'll be able to keep up with, posting things online when you say you will, setting clear expectations for exams and papers and then grading them promptly, responding to students, and being glad to be in the classroom. One of the most obvious ways for me to improve my teaching after this semester is to end class on time. I never thought it was a big deal to run 2-3 minutes over, since many students would linger to talk to me after class every day. But looking at the evaluations, there must have been multiple students who were running to their next class, probably in a different part of campus, and my running over made things difficult for them every day. It hadn't even occurred to me! This means that I'll have to improve the way I structure my lectures (not leave the most important point to the very end), pace myself better (I tend to relax at 40 minutes in, instead of keeping up the pace), and most importantly, remember that mine isn't the only class in the world.

Kids these days

I'd like to record something I learned about my students from reading their final papers: they are much better at writing about visual images than they are at writing about texts. Throughout the semester, I've had my students do close readings of important passages; I've also asked them to analyze a painting nearly every class, looking for details that convey the artist's interpretation of a specific myth. For the final paper, students had a choice of writing about a painting depicting a particular myth or comparing two different texts that treat the same basic mythological episode.

I was surprised by the results: the vast majority – and all of the "weaker" students – chose to write about an image, and nearly all of these wrote more successful papers than I had anticipated. These are students who have a lot of difficulty picking notable details out of texts – they aren't very sensitive to word choice, or tone (e.g., sarcastic, bombastic, self-aggrandizing), or rhetorical effect. Yet, when given an image to work with, they find meaning in color, facial expression, lighting, posture, composition, perspective, etc. It was great!

Short of assigning all visual analysis exercises, what to do with this experience? One thing that I might do is teach close reading as an analogue to visual analysis. That is, start with students' strengths and allow them to build their confidence – yes, they know how to observe, comment, interpret, and form that into an argument about a painting! And we use the same skills with close reading; we just transfer those skills onto textual material. Part of the issue is that it's easier for students to see that artists are interpreters, since they encounter the text first; I want them to see that writers are interpreters, too. Working with translations can be tricky as well.

I'll have to ponder this further. But I'll have plenty of time to do so – I don't think I'll be grading papers for another year and half, thanks to teaching release time! I'll still be teaching languages, but I'll be focused less on culture/literature/history curricula. I really enjoy teaching the culture stuff, but languages have always been my first love, so hurray!

Theseus and the Minotaur

I'm teaching a mythology class this semester, and I've been loving it. I get to read and talk about amazing literature that students can really relate to – what's not to like? Apparently, I'm not the only one enjoying the experience. I was grading a stack of pop quizzes today, and I turned over the page to find this:

One of my students had drawn a labyrinth for me, complete with a smiling Theseus holding Ariadne's thread and a horned Minotaur lurking within. The red pen is mine, solving the puzzle. I can't really imagine doing this for any of my professors in undergrad, but then again, I don't think I ever had a professor as young as me!

Pedagogy Lesson #2

Your students are younger than you think.

When I first started teaching, I was only a couple years out of college myself. I've never been a pop culture maven, but I certainly felt as though my students and I belonged to the same generation. One of the maxims of teaching in a university setting is: students stay the same, but you just keep getting older. Or the converse: you stay the same, but your students keep getting younger. Regardless, the gap between you and your students is constantly widening. 

I was reminded of this fact a few weeks ago when I was teaching the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. The students enjoyed the amusing tale of a newborn trickster god, and I ended the analysis of the text by asking how the Homeric Hymn points forward to Hermes' exploits as an adult figure. I was secretly excited about presenting this image of the Hermes in Disney's Hercules, a film that several students have mentioned that they liked.

This Hermes is voiced, of course, by Paul Shaffer, known best to me as David Letterman's sidekick for the past thirty years. But when I asked the students, "How does this depiction of Hermes correspond to (or not correspond to) the Hermes we meet in the Homeric Hymn?" I was met with silence. Finally, one student raised his hand and said, "Well...maybe because he's wearing purple glasses, you can tell he's an optimist...?" When I responded, "Guys, it's Paul Shaffer!" More silence. "You know, the David Letterman show?" "We only watch Conan!"

Okay, fine, I'm old.

Pedagogy Lesson #1

This is my first term teaching a college-level class entirely of my own design. I have several years' experience with teaching, but the whole construction of a course, top to bottom, still presented new challenges. It's also my first term teaching at my current institution, so I'm learning as I go about the students, classroom culture, and expectations of this particular place.

I gave a pop quiz recently to keep students accountable on their weekly reading assignment. The quiz is meant to be easy – facts, characters from the narrative, no analysis, no tricks. A student who did the reading should get a 5 out of 5. Much to my dismay, students fared rather poorly on the quiz! Only 1 student got 5/5; even the students who made it clear in the rest of class that they had done the reading missed points. The problem was clearly my quiz.

What to do? Pop quizzes were included in the syllabus, and I had run them through a sample pop quiz in the previous class so that they wouldn't be surprised by the format or type of questions. It turns out that the students were having trouble identifying what was important in the long, ancient poems I assigned. They spent too much time trying to memorize the details of planting crops in the agricultural calendar (which I think is not very important) rather than focusing on the mysterious animal fable (which always fascinates me).

Solution: I now post a list of terms on our course website for every reading. The list includes the names of figures, important events, locations, etc., that determine the shape of the narrative. Students who fill out the terms list as they complete the reading will then be prepared for future pop quizzes. And I will let students drop their first quiz grade, if it turns out to be their lowest.

Result: I administered another pop quiz today. I'm pleased to say that the majority of the class did very well. Not only are they doing the reading, but they're demonstrating it through my assessments. Hurray!