Evaluations

Curiouser and curiouser! This place is still full of surprises. Today I was asked to do course evaluations. Well, in my previous life, course evaluations meant that you gave students an evaluation sheet (sometimes electronic) that they filled or ignored, and then you produced nice staple diagrams that everybody admired for a minute and threw away. Here it is more complicated. After the diagrams, someone not involved in the course goes to talk to the students - in case there is something they did not say in the written evaluations. And there surely was! I had never met such outspoken students before. I think they genuinely appreciated that I listened to them. Of course it is a lot of extra work, but I think I like it. Somehow it makes everything worth while. Not just staple diagrams.