Friday, June 16, 2006

shades of red, too


shades of red, too
Originally uploaded by vrgrrl.
joensuu, near the university and european college towns have always given me weird vibes and maybe it's because many universities in europe seem more like a strange cross-cultural showdown, as if we'd mixed private colleges and community colleges in the us to see what would happen. here's my reality show pitch (heavily influenced by, uh, another reality show): this is the story of two different colleges, picked to live in a small european town, and have their lives taped, to see what happens when people stop being polite and start being real...

so the ices are in and my psych ones are lost beyond all reason at this point. the lis ones got sent to gslis rather than my campus office address and psych is just generally baffled about the possibility that they might have some mail they might be holding...so maybe next week i'll get the psy430 ones back?

the ices game is a wild ride and it's funny to look at pages and pages of stat output on a small class -- 11 total forms were filed out for a class of 14, 1 of the 11 didn't fill out questions one or two...so my overall teaching effectiveness...[note: i love words like "effectiveness"...do i teach effectively...to me that always sounds like the corporate bullshit words like efficient, quality, synergy...how about this phrase? let's dialogue...oooohhh another good one. oh. snap. /sarcasm]...is 4.8 with a big ol' standard deviation to throw in some nice uncertainty so i'll be ranked as "excellent" but with all these oooo's around the x...throws my score into strange territory on the edge of excellent and outstanding. so i can't tell if i'll get an asterisk when the list comes out in the fall...but i am running up against other campus "electives" that tend to have crazy high ratings so probably not. but it doesn't really matter in the end. we had a fun class and it was one of my specialty -- "michelle's crazy ideas for wimse" -- courses. so the fact that anyone wanted to come out and play at all and sign up for the course was enough for me. :) although the 4.8 is a pretty amazing score. so it's double cool.

stay tuned for the psy430 report...if i ever get them!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

yeah...i think that one of the most interesting non-obvious (to me, at least) thing *taught* (whether it was by me or by our shared experience in dealing with others) was in exactly what happens in a community center, like the museum...and that we, as citizens, can't just sit around throw money at groups but we need to engage with them and see what is and is not happening, figure out why some things go right and some things don't and if there are big problems then we need to work to help solve them. and the groups need to be receptive to this engagement too...or BOOM. email fights galore!

i'm learning that there's this area of research called "service learning" that all kinds of people at the university are interested in -- where the teacher and the students all go out into the community with no set-in-stone curriculum and then they see what they learn through serving non-profit groups. i think it's groups like the living-learning communities that can really make these classes work.

anyway, i think that the 4.8 goes to all of us together, not just me -- it was an adventurous year for all!!!