Teaching is Hard

Feedback from my students over the course I taught last semester.

• "I can't understand his English. the voice. the way to talk. not only me but also many foreign students agree with this."[sic]
• "He should understand his student, not just teach this course."[sic]
• "I like this course. However, I don't like the instructor" [sic]
• "He is a really good researcher, not a helpful teacher."
• "Should improve himself."
• "Hardy is a new teacher. He doesn't know how to teach professionally."
• "Many times he cannot answer to student problems. He always avoid those by saying 'Uhm, I haven't think about it' and I never get the 'right' answer from him."[sic]
• "The tests and quiz are way too hard. For some reason, he thinks that those must be very tricky."
• "Rate 2/10" [sic]
• "Office hours are there to help students answer or solve problems not to give vague answers or make them feel dumb for coming."[sic]
• "Please instructor needs to improve seriously on teaching and communication skills. Answer the students question, of course the student makes an attempt to answer but if WRONG PLS ANSWER THE QUESTION."[sic]
• "I HIGHLY DO NOT RECOMMEND HIM A PROFESSOR."[sic]
• "I like nothing. This class was a waste of time."
• "Teacher is unhelpful and the material is hard."
• "This is an easy class. The instructor made it difficult by having too much workload."[sic]
• "He was rude and inconsiderate. Graded harshly. How he worked the total grades was generally poor." [sic]
• "The grading, oh my God."
• "Listen to Minorities in the class, we pay tuition fee too." [sic]
• "I felt like you don't care about the students who struggle in the class, Never even listen them."[sic]
• "I wish they would be Dr. Teshome back, Your worse Instructor ever come across in my 4 yrs in college." [sic]
• "This Course seems to be interesting about I guess I would have gain more of it if the instructor knew more about the subject." [sic]

The composite scoring of the multiple-choice part of the survey showed very low scores as well.  The students who took this survey scored me in the bottom 2% of 35771 courses ever taught at Wichita State (since this survey started being given, at least).

The feedback from previous classes I taught tended to be of the opposite nature so its a bit tricky to figure out how to interpret these results.

Well, you can't win them all but least there was this:
"Basically you're a super harsh teacher but I learned a lot in class. I know you will be a lot of backlash because this class had a bunch of assholes in it who got by in their other classes by having a super easy teacher or copying shit and that's practically impossible to do in your class. I think you were a good teacher."

Outside Heating the Inside

It may be January and the heart of winter but today the high temperature for the day is going to be in the mid-70s; I've turned our whole-house fan on and am heating up the inside of our house using the nice, warm, outside air.  I will not be doing the same tomorrow as the high for the day is expected to be 57'F.

I will not make the joke about "Don't like the weather? Just wait five minutes." because I really don't find it funny.

It does seem to be true here in Wichita as of late, though.

VHS Transfer

Part for what has kept me busy this past month has been the long process of converting the contents of a large stack of VHS tapes for their original analog form to a more relevant digital format. This task was inspired by a recent cleaning binge in which I negotiated the removal of our VCR and said tapes if I could make DVDs out of them. A fair number of these tapes were Hollywood movies and after sampling them on the TV we decided that, yes, the VHS tapes can be safely considered low quality and not worth the effort. If we cared enough about these movies, we would be best off  buying DVDs.

Which left the home movies. Hours and hours of home movies.  We ended up hitting up parents on both sides of the family for contributions and ended up with a substantial pile of cassettes.  Thankfully, the transfer process itself was simple: the output of the VCR was fed into a (borrowed) digital video camera which was connected to the computer.  iMovie recorded the footage and allowed me to do any necessary editing and each event was exported as a stand-alone movie.  To make DVDs I used iDVD to build up the DVD menu structure and assemble the individual events onto the disc.  Discs were burned, memories were preserved.

The process is time-intensive but most of it is spent with the equipment unattended while the VCR plays and the computer records.  The format that the video camera puts out (DV) consumes hard drive space rapidly and I used a dedicated 300GB hard drive to collect the footage.  This ended up not being enough for all the tapes so once the drive filled up I created DVDs of the footage and erased the original DV source material.

Several people have suggested I set this up as a mini-business; I have no interest in this. Ignoring the time involved in just copying the footage, doing a good job of transferring this video requires having at least a passing familiarity with the content so intelligent decisions can be made when assembling the individual events on DVDs. Multiple times I had to ask my wife to interpret the events I was transferring, helping me with chronology and relationship. I suppose if I was willing to just make one big movie out of the tape that would not be very time intensive.  I suspect, though, that customers would not be very happy with the product, even though they think this is all they want. I suspect what they actually want is a DVD with high production values that allows them to easily find specific events from the original tape.  The format comes with inherent expectations that are not always recognized and I'd rather not get in the middle of stated and unidentified expectations.