The Results

Alright, well, me, being my clever sociologist self, did come up with a few ways to measure at least my results as a teacher. It’s not like teacher evals are a new thing (although they are to some of my Chinese colleagues, one of whom is going to take my idea), but at least being a sociologist I knew how to make my own and get some interesting results.

I only have information from my sophomores, but 75% of them said that overall they enjoyed my class, while nobody said they didn’t enjoy it (some were ambivalent, obviously). 90% said that I was a good teacher—a full 35% thought very much so—and again, there was nobody who thought I was a bad teacher. 70% found the class interesting, while 10% put it on the boring side of the spectrum (although nobody found it extremely boring). Just about 80% said that I explained things clearly and made them easy to understand, although I apparently talk too fast and have a weird accent (in high school they learned British English, although they all have American accents). Around 60% said that my class had helped them work towards English goals, and about the same said it had helped their English writing improve (it was an English Comp course).

So, I guess overall I’m happy with results like that. I think, though, that social research has probably got to be a bit different in China, and I’m afraid that even in anonymous surveys students might hesitate to say anything negative, even if they didn’t like the class at all, out of respect for the teacher. I’m going to venture that some of those who were supposedly “on the fence” about the class and my teaching were probably leaning more towards the negative side but didn’t dare say so. Also, there’s always the question of whether or not they understood the questions (they were in English). I used one of the sociologist tricks where you reverse the flow of responses so the person can’t just go down the list checking 5, 5, 5, 4, 5, 4, 5 without actually reading the questions, and I was able to catch one person doing that. But who knows how many I’ve missed.

And like any social research, the more open-ended questions are funny because they are often contradictory—which just proves you can’t please everyone. For some people the Portfolio Projects that I had them do were their least favorite part of the class. For many others though it was their favorite. The one consistent part of the class that seemed to be people’s favorite though was when I was howling like a dog to demonstrate what a howl was…in one of my classes I even got a dog from outside to howl back! It seemed like a cheap trick to get them to pay attention, but sometimes cheap tricks work!