When my marathon KMA class ended today, the damn office assistant walked in on me too fast for me to rifle through the student evals, but I did manage to see that at least one student had given me a 100%. Which is nice. Before the students left, they said they had learned a lot, and that the class (which was about online-research techniques) had been useful. I had three guys and one lady today; they were all good students, and one or more of them might come back to KMA to take other courses that I (we) teach. So I guess that's a plus.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
at least one 100% eval
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I got a combined average of 99.1% evaluations from a group of twenty Saudi female students who were training to enter a Saudi airline company. They were great students, but it was hard to keep names straight when over half were wearing niqabs!
So much depends on your audience, doesn't it—how open they are to learning and/or to being pushed, how privileged, lazy, and whiny they might be, etc. My eval average was stellar when I was teaching at Sookmyung back in 2005-08, but at Daegu and later at Dongguk, I was rated mediocre at best (lazy at Daegu, overprivileged at Dongguk). At KMA, I'm almost always near 100% unless I get a particularly tough crowd, and that's happened only once. I still don't know what bug they had up their ass.
Not that one should hang everything on one's evals, of course...
Part of the problem at Daegu was the Korean ESL professors spoke Korean during their classes roughly 70% of the time. (I did a poll in several of my classes and that was the consistent figure.) When students are only studying English as a requirement, they want to coast as much as possible, and that's obviously much easier in a teacher-centered class in which Korean is spoken a majority of the time. When students then find themselves in an all-English, learner-centered environment, which is obviously more demanding, many will resent the native ESL teacher and compare them unfavorably with their Korean professors.
Makes sense. Passivity is much more comfortable.
Post a Comment