Revision

I'm going to revise my sourness between the lines on the last post. It helps to put all the data in one place to notice the real trends and not get hung up on the outliers.

What a difference a year makes

What I said about last year's class? If you give a lot, you get a lot, and everyone is happy?

Let's just leave it at how much I liked most everyone last year. I ran into a bunch of them at the conference and they were all so nice and happy! They worked hard and were on top of things and only complained a teeny bit when things were rough and they recognized that I was working hard too and made sure other people knew it. Nice, nice people who I'm grateful to know.

Ask a lot, give a lot, get a lot

Today was the last day of class, and I've gotten some really nice comments from people about the course and my work. Most of them include some version of "it was hard," but that this was not necessarily a downside. I got a little feedback before the class suggesting that I may want to dampen my expectations of the class, that I might be demanding too much. But this experience, building on my prior experience, is that high expectations -- not just asking for a lot but also communicating the expectation that the students are capable of pushing themselves to achieve a lot -- are generally more associated with good classes than setting an expectation of easiness. A key element to making that equation work, however, is giving a lot: I worked my ass off to get this course together, and it showed.

I hated in grad school when the professor would say, "Oh, I fully expect everyone to get an A in this course if they work hard" or "Oh, this class is pretty low-key." Maybe there was some social desirability issue there (like me! like me!) or some attempt not to scare off people from other departments. I hated even more the courses where the professor didn't seem prepared or didn't seem to care about getting the syllabus up on the web by the first day or about providing extra help to students who wanted it.

The best courses were those in which the professor was prepared -- or at least apologetic when things weren't quite up to speed, which happens -- and in which the bar was set high. My advisor's class is a great example of this, and I completely stole his grading philosophy: A perfectly competent job will get you a B. To get an A, you have to show innovation, mastery, and a strong sense of having pushed yourself to think things through. Instead of wondering and whining about points getting taken off from 100, people worried instead about how to add points to the defaul tof 85, how to go above and beyond. The grade distributions ended up pretty similar in the end, but the actual product and process of creating it was vastly different.

I think another characteristic that comes from giving a lot and asking a lot is that it engenders a lot of mutual respect. You don't ask a lot out of people when you don't have a lot of respect for them. Students know that, and they reflect back the respect they intuitively feel themselves receiving.

So, I'm sure not all the evaluations will be glowing, but I'm certain that the criticisms will reflect a norm of high expectations (you've done a lot and we know you can do more) and a tone of respect.

Teaching is hard, but fun

Teaching is going well, all things considered. The class is really working hard. This first go feels like a rough draft, though: everyday I think of a ton of ways to improve it for next year. More when I'm not buried under grading (note to self: next year, halve the homework assignments).

Busy bees

Things have been busy, with moving and planning my class and all. Moving is always painful; combining households into a place with no storage is doubly so; not getting all your friends to help shlep boxes is triply so. But the commute to work is greatly reduced and much more pleasant. It's good to get out of Baltimore.

Today I had lunch with the boss. She liked my syllabus a lot and said she could tell it was a lot of work, which made me feel happy, because it was a lot of work, and I really think it's pretty good. I borrowed a lot of readings and will borrow a lot of lecture points from the classes I took at JHSPH (particularly my advisor's class in terms of grading philosophy and the final paper), but I think I managed to synthesize a wide range of important stuff. It's been a fun exercise, because working on the dissertation gets you so drilled down into one topic, it's nice to have to go back and think about the entire field again with a more experienced eye.

Making lectures is hard, though.

Friday, oh Friday

If you're reviewing a paper, before letting forth a spew of verbal diarrhea about all the things that you find confusing or weird about the paper, maybe you should try looking back at the paper to see if what you're confused about is actually explained. Thanks. People will have a lot more respect for your comments.

Of course, I'd also have a lot more respect for the positive reviews if they bothered to make comments instead of just scores.

My NCA paper landed in kind of a random panel that I'm sure will be perfectly lovely, but I think I'm going to let my advisor cover it, since he has other stuff going on for that conference and I'm keen on only one visit to San Diego this fall (if I'm going to bother going west, I have other places I want to and ought to go).

I've been working on both my thesis defense presentation and my class this week. The presentation is supposed to be 40 minutes, which is as long as I had for my job talk, but now I have so many other things to talk about also. I'm not really sure how it's all going to fit. In terms of class stuff, I've been perusing prior years and other syllabi from up the road and realizing that I have a pretty clear notion of the range of things that should be taught in an intro to SBS class. Of course there are more things that I can really fit, so I have to weed out some stuff. But it's nice to feel authoritative enough to have an independent opinion and to be able to critique and change how it's been done before instead of just having to copy it because I don't know what else to do.