And that's done

Busy life is busy. (I thought I had posted yesterday but I guess not?)

The biggest achievement for me this morning was finally digesting all my evaluation numbers from last year and adding it into my annual review (we STILL have to do these annually, even though we were at one time told "oh, with the three-year post-tenure reviews, we should abandon these" but I guess someone in some upper office had boxes that needed ticking).

I am not a terrible teacher. My scored ranged from a low of 4.01/5.0 to a high of 4.67/5.0.

The lowest score was from the spring ecology class. No, I haven't looked up the roster from that section to remind myself of who was in there and to try to figure out why.

Nor have I looked at the comments. I am not required to, and I figure "don't read the comments" applies equally well here - people whose opinion I respect will come to me and tell me "hey, this thing you're doing in class just isn't working" or something like that, and more and more, the anonymous student comments veer towards the meaner end of things, and while I should be immune to that, I'm not, and I don't want my day ruined.

The 4.67 was from the spring intro class, but as I remember, that was a small class with several very good students in it who kind of pulled everyone else up along with them.

And yes. More and more I think there is some baseline of "this is how well a person teaches" but that baseline can be affected by the make up of the class - some of the worst recent evals I got were from that terrible class several years ago where there were a number of people (from another major) that were so rude and disruptive that several of "our" majors in the class spoke to them (without my knowledge) and told them to knock it off, I was well-respected in my department and it was unfair to THEM (the students in our major) to make them put up with that nonsense (It didn't help much).

And yeah, there's also some feedback there: if I have an enthusiastic, cohesive class, I think I teach better (and I do more different stuff; I will show videos I found that apply to the topic, I'll do more things). If I have people who seem bored or resistant or rude, I won't. (because: why bother? I'm too old to try to get people to "like" me or my subject if they aren't inspired by my regular level enthusiasm for it)

I don't know.

I guess I should be happy with the numbers I got, though. (And the class I taught for the first time ever last year? I got a 4.1/5.0, and that was with majors from the other major that sometimes have problems with the level of rigor we expect.

I also had a dumb weird anxiety dream last night, maybe tangentially related to not having this done yet, and knowing it was due a couple weeks ago, and just having not got to it (and not having had the numbers to work with):

William Shatner (in a younger incarnation than now; about the age he was at during the Star Trek movies) was teaching our senior-seminar class. And he was having the students do all manner of silly, rinky-dink assignments, and giving them good grades, and he was walking around handing these things back and loudly moralizing about how we need to think about how we teach and change how we teach and disrupt education and all that. And he was saying about how people in academia needed to CHALLENGE academia and how things were done

And I was looking at the collages he had the students do (?) and going "wait, no"

And I looked at him and said "But we have so many people outside academia criticizing it and challenging it, those of us in academia need to do our best and maybe recognize that we can't overturn a couple hundred years of how things are done in a few weeks"

and then I woke up.

I don't know. That's why I'm tired: my brain doesn't let me rest even when asleep.


But anyway. I got the thing done and....womp womp, I forgot my chair is out of town until Saturday, so I could have put it off but at least now it's done.