This was the last meeting day for a couple of my classes.
I told each of them that I felt like this was a bad semester. I stand by that. The general emotional state of campus, the engagement by students, etc. was the worst I’ve had in 15 years as a teacher.
That’s not to claim that is an absolute, of course. There are no absolutes. There were still fantastic students. I won’t shout out with names here because that’d be inappropriate, but I can think of ten or so students who really nailed it out of the park this semester, and there were many more who did good work.
But the ones that didn’t do good work this semester were… bad.
I do my own version of course evaluations– fully anonymous. I read over them quickly at the end of my second class today, and I wanted to share a couple of de-identified anonymous thoughts.
I asked my students to compare the class to a game and explain why. And one student said (I’m paraphrasing a bit) that it was like League of Legends because there were so many different characters and people had no problem just walking out of matches.
Ouch. That’s something I noted, too, but I didn’t think one of the students would call the others out on that.
In my other class, there was a ping-pong moment where I asked for favorite and least favorite things, and if I were to move 4 of the 20 submissions, there’d be an overlap where from one-to-the-next someone’s favorite thing was another’s least favorite.
One person in one of my classes complained that I gave them time to work on their written open-book-due-at-midnight final in class but then talked to students and to my TAs during that time. We were talking about the exam topics (and I’m sure we went off-topic a bit, too– if you ever teach a games class, you know that game students get passionate about game ideas and can tend to sort of orbit a major concept).
Another student called out the use of guest speakers, claiming to not attend the classes those days due to a “lack of interest” in those topics.
One response is incredibly misogynistic and makes me sort of sad.
But most of the reviews of my bad semester– at least in these SurveyMonkey pieces I use to ask targeted questions so I know what to change– were either positive or matter-of-fact. One class scored a 5.9 out of 7 when I asked for an overall score, and yes, I know it’s weird to ask for a score on a scale with seven and not five. That was the class I was sure was going to get panned because we took two weeks to work with a guest instructor on campus then had spring break, so for three weeks many students (the ones not paying close attention) felt like they weren’t in class. That class also had the worst rate of successful collaborations I’ve ever witnessed (four of seven groups needed reshuffling or fell apart completely). Most of those students were pleased with the class, though. Made me feel better.
I showcased the specific statements above because I think they epitomize what was wrong with those classes, and I fear for the responses on Friday, as there is one particularly vocal student I’ve tried to be fair to but also keep from monopolizing that class, and I know that some of the students are very upset about that.
I expect to hear how upset they are because this semester seems to be following the political climate. Students reacted in hostile ways (only one or two toward me, but there were some decidedly hostile responses to the questions I asked). These same students, though, didn’t voice their concerns in class. Had the one worried about noise, for example, said something, I’d have gladly asked people to come to me to talk (and had this student listened closely, I did say that they could go somewhere else to write if the lab wasn’t comfortable). I wish someone other than me had expressed disgust at people just getting up and walking out of class, but no one did. And I really, really wish people had expressed to me that they felt that guest lecture days should be optional so I could have explained to them how embarrassing it is when only 10 members of a 25 person class show up for a guest speaker who gave valuable time to help them learn about something.
I think it’s a case of the entitlement blues, but I am greatly encouraged that in spite of how clearly I saw flaws this semester the vast majority of my students still learned and enjoyed their experiences.
This is the first semester since my grad course work where I’m going to be overjoyed for it to all end next week, though. I need to regroup and use my newfound knowledge of what students were seeing to tweak so that in the fall these things won’t linger.