Metrics with no baselines | Banned from LiveJournal
I received my evaluations back from Spring Semester today. I seem to have done pretty well; on a 5-point Likert, ranging from 5 (excellent) to 1 (poor), my mean was above 4.5 on all eight questions. "Overall rating of instructor" was 4.67.
Of course, without knowing what the mean scores for these questions are among the other doctoral students, or indeed, among the faculty, how am I supposed to know how well I am doing?
At Muskingum, they provided metrics on mean scores among all faculty to have a baseline against which to prove myself. Am I deficient in one aspect of my teaching compared to others? I could find things to work on.
It doesn't help that my students refused to be critical of me in their written comments. Here is a sample of answers to "What were the strongest features of this course?":
instructor enthusiasm and knowledge of subject
Tim Burke helped to make it even more interesting. His lectures are easy to pay attn to
Instructor: great personality great humor very knowledgeable about everything overall great guy
I liked how the material was related with good examples
Outgoingness of instructor. His willingness to give examples
The instructor by far was the strongest feature of this course
instructor motivated us to come to class, lots of enthusiasm
he is positive and made you want to come to class every day
funny and energetic
etc, etc. 38 comment sheets, zero critical comments.
If they're really concerned about making us better teachers, they need a stronger evaluative system. Providing us data on mean scores of the quantitative data would be a step in the right direction. Otherwise, I might suck as a teacher and not even know it.
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In other news, I've been banned from Livejournal. I don't know why, exactly, but I can't access the site AT ALL. I can't even go to the main page. It appears they think I am a googlebot or something like that. It says it's a temporary ban, so we'll wait and see. It comes at an interesting time, as I was planning on cutting Livejournal off entirely this weekend anyway. Since more people use livejournal than, say, entertainmentweakly.com, my defunct Livejournal was stealing search results from EW. So everything was going to turn private over on that side anyway... and will be, whenever LJ lets me access their site again. Why am I a paid member there, again?
Oh, and I think I'm going to have to upgrade to MT 3.3 here soon, because stuff is starting to get a little clunky around here.
Rays game tonight -- go Tribe? I think? Go Rays? Luckily the one Rays-Tribe series last year happened while I was in Las Vegas and I didn't have to make these decisions.
