I happened to notice a “rate my teacher” site for several friends I was googling. If there are more than one or two evals on the site, it is fun to read them if it’s one-sided, i.e. if most are positive and only a couple are negative. What’s fun is to imagine the personality types who put the negative stuff in. Remember, I know these people and can imagine how they operate in the classroom. One got rave reviews of the type “at first it seems like he’s disconnected but then you realize how much he’s challenging you and by the end of the semester you realize how much you’ve learned” but two that warned prospective students away from the course b/c the prof was disorganized, changed assignments, etc. Knowing this particular prof, my guess is he was adapting the syllabus to the class. For some people, changes are traumatic; you can see them going home after the first class meeting and carefully filling in a binder/calendar with dates things are due, what’s due, what size paper it is to be written on, etc. and any change throws their whole carefully constructed schedule out the window. Funny.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
