Maybe you could ask them to see if they missed some caveats about applicability when the made their notes.
That seems a bit outside of what I would consider useful information on a syllabus. If it just specified that students are responsible for information imparted in lecture, that would be fine.
I tend to think that the more is written on a syllabus, the less likely students are to read it.
I'm not sure I was ever shown how to take notes. How do I know if I'm doing it right?
This practice infuriated me to no end when I was in college. The instructor's only legitimate concern is that I'm understanding the material. How I do it is none of their fucking business.
Here at Last Chance Community College we spend a lot of time teaching students the basic study skills they have forgotten or never learned. I suppose that might seem intrusive to some of our better students, but if we don't do it, no one will.
Even if you are at a decent four year state school, you are going to have a lot of people who never learned how to study, and will get frustrated and drop out if no one tells them.
All this is going to become much more common as accreditation agencies put more and more emphasis on retention rates as a measure of school quality. The whole "We are gatekeepers: It is your job to figure out how to get through us" model of college is on its way out.
That said, it is stupid to study skills as if they were one size fits all. Sometimes rewriting your notes can be very helpful.
Sometimes rewriting your notes can be very helpful.
Pensmanship class, for example.
I was thinking about typing up your notes, filling in sentences to make them complete, organizing things better on the page and maybe checking back with an audio tape of the lecture. It is not a crazy thing to do, I swear.
I was making a stupid joke, not disagreeing.
Never mind. There is no news after all.
I have been asking one of my classes, which is very large, to take turns uploading class notes to a wiki. I certainly don't expect everyone to take notes; it's not how I learn best, either. But it's been helpful to absent students to get a few notes from missed classes, and it's been fascinating for me to see what various students get out of our discussion, to see what sticks. But the main thing I've learned is that only a very few students seem able to figure out what the key arguments are, while others totally misrepresent the whole discussion. It's made me become a lot clearer in my teaching, highlighting what I need for them to take away by repeating it, or even saying, this is going to be really important, versus, hey, I'm just speculating here.
I tend to think that the more is written on a syllabus, the less likely students are to read it.
This is right, and seriously misunderstood at Heebie U. It's a thing for people to hand out syllabi that sprawl on for pages and pages and pages, talking about all sorts of abstractions that only make sense if you are looking at the course in hindsight.
12: At AWB U too. One of the reasons I am particularly happy about getting a new job for next year is that we were expected to submit our syllabi for departmental review 6 months in advance to someone who thinks if a syllabus isn't 10-15 pages long, it might not cover every single aspect of what might happen during the semester. The example assignment sheets we were given were all about 5 times longer than the papers the students were supposed to produce. My reaction to all this, for years, has been for the department to supply pedagogical research showing the efficacy of 10-page assignment sheets, because IME, this is never ever a good way for students to think about writing, and can prevent them from thinking on their own about what their own arguments are.
...has been to ASK for the department to supply pedagogical research
It's made me become a lot clearer in my teaching, highlighting what I need for them to take away by repeating it, or even saying, this is going to be really important
Yeah, my best teaching had me writing an actual outline of major points on the board before class, and pointing to it as class went on, which seemed grammar-schoolish somehow, but really worked for both me and the students.
In my infuriating teacher evaluation this semester, I had an outline on the sideboard, and was pointing to it as I went, and the observer didn't notice this. When we went over his notes, I asked him about it. In his report, he included something like "Heebie says she put the topic on the board, but I didn't see it."
He also wrote "In a few instances, Dr. Geebie posed questions and then restated them so as to clarify what she was asking. Try to pose questions clearly from the beginning."
He also wrote that I appeared not to know their names, which totally infuriated me. Also that none of the students had their books out. (I don't make them bring their giant calculus book to class.) Also that I was not overly demonstrative.
He also said there didn't appear to be much context to today's class, at least to an outsider. UM, why do you think that might be, one-day visitor?
He also said lots of good things, but clearly I'm still irritated by this guy.
Ugh, I hate teaching evaluations. About half of mine are clear expressions of the observer's attempt to ignore anything I might be trying to do by giving condescending advice about how they do it. And blatantly misrepresenting what I'm talking about--it's awful. My students seem to have no problem figuring out what a sonnet is from our discussion; why can't the observer, who should already know, but writes absurd stuff in the eval report? Or when 30/35 students volunteer amazing comments to the discussion, but the report is all about the one kid who came in late and didn't take his coat off, showing that I am not engaging enough in my style.
I got observed yesterday by someone who, thank God, actually paid attention.
but the report is all about the one kid who came in late and didn't take his coat off, showing that I am not engaging enough in my style.
This. The observer knew Student H well, and said "Student H was able to hide out and not participate." Dude. I've had Student H for three semesters, and he's a lazy kid, and I'm not his mom. It's a college class. I don't give a shit if Student H hides out and doesn't participate, given that he has to make some socially awkward effort to do so.
I just finished teaching Day 1 of a 2-day workshop on an annotation program to a mixed group of (a) the professors who are running labs, and decided to hire me to teach them how to use this thing, and (b) their student research assistants who were required to come but didn't have any context or internally motivated desire to acquire the relevant skills. It's pretty entertaining to see the difference in appropriate audience/note-taking/paying-attention/following directions behavior between these two groups. The professors are obviously out of practice at not having all eyes on them in a teaching setting. I'm pretty sure the students were the only ones taking any notes.
Lots of people have very different approaches to note taking. I knew a lot of people as an undergrad who went in for really lengthy elaborate notes for everything, sometimes to a totally absurd degree,* who then condensed those notes, often through multiple repeated iterations as part of their pre-exam studying process.
I, on the other hand, took lecture notes mostly as part of focused listening. I don't think I ever really read them again as I tended to remember them once I'd made them. The process of making them was useful, reading them again later, not so much. Also, like a lot of people mine were written in impenetrable short hand that didn't even make sense to me half the time.
Everyone's different and it changes. In graduate school I stopped taking notes in seminars more or less completely as I needed to focus in a different way.
* one friend had a folder of notes for her 1st year psychology course that was, I shit not, longer than the course book itself.
were written in impenetrable short hand that didn't even make sense to me half the time.
I thought that was just me. I've taken notes at various times in my life, but I don't think I've ever recovered much, if any, information from them.
My first and worst observer in NYC said I was the most ineffective teacher she'd ever seen, that my students learn nothing and that I am wasting their time. How could she tell? Well, one student was sitting there and looked tired and distracted, and didn't participate. Out of a class of 25 students, the rest of whom had their hands in the air. Clearly I needed to be more engaging.
The rest of her criticism focused on how I was far too energetic and fun to listen to, that I was a "performative little girl who gets off on attention from 18-year-old boys" and "should go back to the theater or wherever I came from and stop wasting our students' tuition money." Also, my questions were far too difficult and rigorous for "our students" (mostly Af-Am, from the projects) to answer.
I pointed out that 24/25 students had perfectly good and interesting answers to my too-difficult questions. And wait, am I too intellectually rigorous or a brainless Playboy bunny?
A lot of my bad evals seem to be about this. I'm too difficult, and also too energetic and playful.
re: 21
There are usually bits that makes sense, the circled bits with big 'fuck off!' annotations and the bullet pointed bits. And some of the shorthand and abbreviations makes sense. "w'" for with, etc. But after time passes other bits, even the bits that seemed to matter to me [underlined, or asterisk'd] are just nonsense.
A while ago, I started taking notes at lectures in secretary hand. It's a way for me to practice secretary hand, and a way for me to look interested when I am bored to tears. Also, no one can read over my shoulder.
Further to 22, her recommendation for getting even the last student to participate was to ask every question as a yes/no question. "In this story, did Billy want to get the blue sweater for Christmas, or did he not want the blue sweater?" was her example of a college-appropriate discussion question. I was tempted to spit on her.
I was tempted to spit on her.
I think an argument could be made that this was appropriate. Also if you had salted her.
I used to take notes for about five minutes and then switched to drawing imaginary maps and aimless doodles.
I mainly drew cartoons that were tangentially related to possible puns on whatever new linguistic vocabulary was being discussed. Then I'd interrupt the class to show everybody my cartoon. In retrospect, this was probably very irritating behavior to my poor professors.
While your rich professors could not have cared less.
My teaching observation of a few weeks ago went generally well, but the criticisms I did get made me inordinately angry. I apparently need to focus more on grammar point X, which happens to be an area our new curriculum puts no emphasis on whatsoever. I in fact have mentioned this problem with the new curriculum to my supervisor (the one who did the observation) several times, with suggestions about ways to better integrate this grammar point, and each time have been ignored or rebuffed.
I also was told in the written evaluation that I need to be more aggressive about correcting students as they speak, which I agree I sometimes should do more of. But the example given of a moment I should have jumped in... was something a student said that is entirely correct. Double accusative verbs, bitchez. Learn 'em!
Genuine question: are college teaching evaluations more fraught than other professional performance evaluations (which IME also suck and are generally full of irritating and irritatingly wrong comments)? Because academics seem to complain about them more than everyone else combined, but I'm not sure I understand why.
I'm a big syllabus person. I emphasize to the students that it is not a document you read once at the beginning of the course to get an overview. It is something you go back to at different stages of the game to get more details about what you are supposed to be doing. I also tell them that they should hold off on reading many parts of it until we get to that part of the course.
performative little girl
And your observer didn't know what the word "performative" meant either, it seems.
Thinking about it, I guess most professional performance evaluations are based on obversations over an extended period, often by several people, instead of just one person observing one hour of work on one day. That which does seem like it could significantly increase the arbitrarity.
31: Course evaluations are frustrating--more frustrating than referee's reports on your research, for instance--because the people who are giving the evaluations by virtue of their very position, don't know what the hell they are talking about.
It is better to view student evaluations as a record of reactions from an experimental population, rather than as an assessment of your merits as a teacher by an expert. You think, "hmm, they hated that. What does that mean for whether they learned?" not "they hated that, I suck as a teacher."
35: oh, yeah, i'd certainly expect those to be awful. I meant faculty observations.
31: Yes, they are, in part because unlike other professions, academics rarely get to see one another work, especially in the classroom, and everyone thinks the way they do it is the only way. And watching someone else do a new thing can be really threatening. I've had some evals from profs who said that they learned a lot and wanted to re-read the text in question because we were having what seemed to be a new kind of discussion about it, and others who projected a lot of shit onto me about gender performance, especially, or they just didn't pay attention at all. My roommate, an Eastern European woman who is totally brilliant but not the kind of softie-pie some of her colleagues are, regularly gets teaching evals about how she really needs to use the words "sweetheart" and "honey" to soften her approach. (Her male colleagues report receiving no such suggestion.) I love watching other people teach, and try to do it when I can. Yes, at first, my reaction might be "I have no idea what's going on here" but eventually I can see a method there. It takes practice to notice it.
33: No, she didn't.
Like, for example, I hope my commenter evaluation is based on more than 34. "Can't write in English?" Yes, I can! I can!
I'm not sure how performance evaluations generally work in other fields, but in my experience in academia, someone comes into your classroom, observes you for an hour, and then evaluates you from that. Classes often create their own dynamics, frames of reference, and ways of interacting, which I think can be hard to grasp as a one-day visitor. Ideally the observer would be able to come more than once over the course of the semester, but I think that rarely happens.
That said, I've also gotten great practical advice from observers. I was once evaluated by a woman from my university's teaching center who didn't even speak German, but was genius at reading classroom dynamics. She asked me all sorts of questions after the hour about how I had led the class, and talked a lot about "decision points" in my interactions with the students.
On preview, what urple says in 34.
Michael Scriven, a philosopher who has studied evaluation in education and almost every other context, has called the use of evaluations based on a single classroom visit by peers "a disgrace." There is simply no way you can get reliable information out of it.
Double accusative verbs, bitchez.
Let me show you them.
I did see a long-ish syllabus once in law school that was pretty great. It was set up so that you could plug in your course outline for studying for the exam.
35: I'm sure that this doesn't apply to you, rob, but one of the reasons that I never took statistics in college was that it was always rated around a 1.2 on a 5 point scale in student evaluations. It was the only rating I ever saw that went below a 3.3. I think that the teacher was probably dreadful.