Teaching recap // Fall 2015

I've had the course evaluations for a couple weeks now. I skimmed them briefly, but only today took the time to summarize them for myself to make sense of how I'm going to proceed into the spring semester (I'm teaching the same course).

Taken with sufficient grains of salt, the student criticisms were enormously helpful.

Unsurprisingly, the course practices that helped the students most were, in order:

1) Homework
2) Problems worked in class
3) Textbook
4) Power Point slides
5) Lecture

Well, that was humbling, to be sure. And again, not unexpected.

The summary of student comments on how I can improve:

Write larger/neater
Be more organized
Engage class more with examples
Don't just read off the PowerPoint slides; address concepts better

These were the best takeaways for me.

How was I distracting as a person? How did I get in the way of the material and their understanding of it?

I am going back and forth about posting these here, for anyone to read, but for the sake of confronting my weaknesses, and baring my failures, here they will stay.

In general, they found the intellectual challenge of the course to be overwhelmingly higher/much higher, and that much more was expected of them compared to other courses.
They also said they learned more, and that it was more important to them than the average course.

One final cut came when they said that, though the course was (perfectly symmetrical distribution) 'good' on the whole, 3 out of a 5 pt scale--the effectiveness of the instructor's teaching methods was only 2.66/5 on a 5 pt scale. I was closer to 'good' than 'fair,' but barely. Ouch. Point taken.

The brightest spot in the evaluations for me came in their tremendous support of the devotions I did every Thursday. That made me feel really good, and want to work so much harder on making the rest of the course better.

Class starts again on Tuesday next week. Here's to massive improvement.