Fooled You!

Well, maybe not you specifically, gentle reader, but I sure did pull the wool over the eyes of my agriculture students last semester. You see, I finally got up enough nerve to request my student evaluations. Overall, the statistics were fairly average, not phenomenal but also not embarrassing. The students learned neither “a great deal” nor “nothing” from discussion sections; I neither “stimulated great interest” nor “destroyed interest, was boring.” My lowest score, 2.96 out of 5, regarded the amount of criticism of the term papers—only half of which I read. The rest the professor read, so of course that half of the class is going to receive “too little feedback” from me. My highest score, on the other hand, was 4.38, in response to the question, “Was the TA willing to provide help for students who needed it?” ...Not that I had even a single student show up to office hours over the entire semester. But not for lack of letting them know that the opportunity existed, apparently.

The part that made me laugh out loud for a good long time was that my second-highest score, 4.18, belonged to the question, “Did the discussion leader (TA) seem knowledgeable?”, which mean that I was 0.82 points away from “[knowing] the content very well.” I wonder how I managed to give the impression that I actually knew what I was doing? Silly students. Little did they know that I was learning the material right along with them, and in many cases, they had already known vastly more about agriculture by the time they were five than I ever will. Silly students, they make me laugh.