Tomorrow is the last day of the semester. I’m giving an exam, lab reports are due, as are term papers in another class. I’m giving my final exam on Wednesday. I’m done literally teaching until January, but I can’t figure out whether I’m on the easy slide through, or whether I’m about to smack into a wall very hard.
Cynic that I am, I’m guessing the latter.
Oh, boy: our twice-a-year ritual, in which we hand out forms in our classes and let our students grade the faculty. And then, in another yearly ritual every fall, the faculty will gather and peer intensely at the numbers, presented with at least three significant digits, and we will see graphs and charts and over-interpreted analyses of these gnomic parameters.
Unfortunately, they probably aren’t as useful as administrators would like to imagine.
Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching.
His experiment took place with students at the Bocconi University Department of Economics in Milan, Italy. There, students are given a cognitive test on entry, which establishes their basic aptitude, and they are randomly assigned to professors.
The paper compared the student evaluations of a particular professor to another measure of teacher quality: how those students performed in a subsequent course. In other words, if I have Dr. Muccio in Microeconomics I, what’s my grade next year in Macroeconomics II?
Here’s what he found. The better the professors were, as measured by their students’ grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students.
“If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students,” Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don’t enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.
I also have some reservations about this study, though. What if the Macroeconomics II professor simply shares some biases with the Macroeconomics I professor, and is an easy grader? I wouldn’t want my teaching to be evaluated by how well students do in another professor’s course. That’s as scary as the arbitrary roller-coaster of student evaluations. I’ve had a few students openly downgrade me, for instance, because they know I’m an atheist, and they love Jesus so much.
But otherwise, yes, this jibes well with our general assumptions about the process: grade leniently, give light amounts of work, and students will tend to rate you highly. (They’ll also rate you highly if you’re inspiring and enthusiastic and entertaining, too, so it’s not all a drive to slackerdom).
If you must know, my student evaluations are fine — not the highest at my university, but not grounds for concern (oh, yeah, another thing about faculty assessment of these things: apparently, we’re all supposed to be above average, which simply doesn’t work). I generally ignore the numeric scores, which are mostly pointless noise, but the written comments are often actually informative and let me know what aspects of the course I should change next time I teach it.
Also, I had my students evaluate me on Monday, so I’m saying all this after they’ve had an opportunity to hack at me a bit.
I am 100% done with my grading. My desk is clear. It shines so…I can see a glint of light reflected off the tears in my eyes. Perhaps I will dance, or sing, or raise my arms and eyes to the heavens and shout, “Hallelujah!”
I am totally caught up for the first time this semester.
Do not tell me that next week I’m giving a lab final, an in-class exam, and that I will be getting nine major term papers turned in. No, that’s not happening. If I deny it enough, they’ll all go away, right?
I took a break from the grading and grabbed a quick aerial shot of the results of last night’s snow storm. Morris is still flat, but at least it has a fresh coat of whitewash.
I won’t inflict more drone videos on you until I’ve mastered that flying thing. Also, what do you call it, video editing. Yeah, that would be good to know.
Now, back to the stacks!
So much snow. So much grading. I need to dig myself out from under both today, so I’m not going to be posting much, even though there’s a few things I’m itching to write about. So, instead, I leave you with some dance moves.
It’s snowing. It’s snowing a lot. It’s also actually rather pretty outside, since I don’t have to drive in it. So I thought, once I got home this evening, that I’d throw the ol’ drone up in there and see how it coped with dim light and blowing snow.
No, it doesn’t. It flies just fine, doesn’t even notice the steady breeze, but the snow piles up on the lens and reflects the red running lights on the machine so you see next to nothing other than bloody red glare. You do get a blurry glimpse of Mary shoveling snow from the sidewalk, though — and now you know who does all the real work around here.
The weather is supposed to worsen over night, and the snow doesn’t end until Tuesday evening. It’s Minnesota, all right.
Rebecca Watson is trying to clear out all my old stuff, so she’s having a sale in the Pharyngula store! Buy this magnificent Chibi PZ T, use the code FREEMUG when you buy it, and she’ll toss in a Pharyngula mug at no extra cost.
Hot tip: if you’re one of those persistent Twitter eggs, or maybe some guy writing a frenzied anonymous email to me, I will be compelled to take you far more seriously if you’re wearing one of these while composing your assault on my dignity, or photoshopping my face onto something obscene. You’re so obsessed with me already, I don’t understand how you can not wear one of these.
Or alternatively, if you’re one of my students and really want to get to me, show up to class wearing one of these and you’ll make me blush and stammer and maybe even flee the room (flight not guaranteed).
Order now! For the War on Christmas!
I’m not from Minnesota, but my mother’s side of the family is, and my sister just posted this antique photograph of my ancestors living in Fertile, Minnesota in the early 1900s.
I knew that tall young man in the center at the back — that’s my great-grandfather, Peter Westad, and I recall him as a tall, lean, very old man with a thick Scandinavian accent and a magnificent mustache, apparently inherited from his father, Jens, the wonderfully bearded fellow sitting in front with his wife, Marit. I can see a bit of a family resemblance, but mostly I want to get a suit just like old Jens’.
This reminiscence brought to you by a brief break in my current grading/teaching hell. We’re in the last two weeks of class. I have to stuff so much stuff in their heads, and there is all this administrative stuff rising to destroy me, too. The life of a Minnesota farmer is looking awfully appealing right now…
Like many of you, we just finished a fine vegan meal assembled by my daughter, Skatje. Except most of you didn’t have the vegan part. And really, no one else had my daughter cooking for them. So we just have the meal part in common, but that’s enough, right?
I tried to start up that other fine Thanksgiving tradition, the fight over politics or religion at the dinner table, but was completely stymied by the fact that my entire family agrees on everything. No grace, and ugh Trump ick talk about anything else OK we hate him but this pumpkin pie is delicious.
I thought we’d avoid that other Thanksgiving tradition of the football game in the background, but for some reason, Skatje has gotten into handegg and has told me we must watch Green Bay vs. Chicago tonight. So that’s ahead of us.
Oh, you didn’t know you got me a present? You did! I’m in the Amazon Affiliate program, you see, and occasionally I include a link to that evil empire in my blog entries, and you click on it, and maybe you buy something, and then I get a tiny cut of what you spent. Once a month I get a little gift certificate from Amazon. I’ve been saving them up for about 8 months so I could splurge on a toy, and last week the total finally reached what I needed to cover all of the costs, so you got me an early Christmas present. It’s very nice.
I got myself a DJI Phantom 3 Advanced Quadcopter Drone
It’s slick and easy to fly, and the software is reasonably sophisticated. I did have a bit of concern when I first set it up and it told me I needed to update the firmware…and the stupid installation procedure failed utterly. I thought for a while I was doomed to have a plastic brick that could sit on the table and buzz, because DJI has a notoriously terrible reputation for customer service, but fortunately they released a brand new software update the day after I got it that worked perfectly.
So that’s how I spent Thanksgiving morning: I took it up for a couple of flights and went spying out the local neighborhood.
Here’s an ugly example. I just went across the street to the UMM parking lot and zoomed it up to a 100 meters and fumbled about with the controls. It was fun! It’s hard to get smooth movies that show what I want — partly because there were a few times I was wiggling the wrong joystick, and because when it was high and drifted away on this blustery day, I sometimes lost track of the orientation and had to scan around to figure out where I was and what way I was pointing. Don’t feel obligated to watch it — it’s just me noodling about in the sky.
Practice makes perfect, though, unless on one of these practice flights I crash it and then have to save up gift certificates for another 8 months to get a new one.
Now I just have to figure out how to mount lasers or a missile launcher on it, and I’ll have everything a boy could want, a real stress-reliever.
