Pete's Log: survey says ...
Entry #1310, (School)(posted when I was 24 years old.)
Since this whole teaching thing is still a skill I'm learning, I decided to give my class a survey today to get some feedback on how the class is going for them. I was surprised to see the results were more positive than I expected. One of the questions was "Is the pace of the class too slow, too fast, or just right." I got twenty people saying just right, five saying too slow, and three saying too fast. I asked them how much time they spent on homework compared to their other classes. One person said the discrete homework took less time than homework for other classes. Seven said it took more time than other classes, and the rest said the homework load was average compared to their other classes.
I asked them what material we've covered they had seen before. There was a lot of variation here. Some had seen everything before, some had seen none of it. Most of them had seen some of the material before, but there was little overlap of what people had seen before. I guess the most common thing for them to have seen before was set theory. But it looks like I need to continue teaching as if none of the material has been seen before.
I asked them which material they were having the most difficulty with, and the answers were pretty uniform: pseudo-code and big-O (and big-omega and big-theta) notation. So I'll probably review that some.
Finally, I asked for any other comments. Some students gave me some really good ideas for improving the lectures, especially regarding the examples I give in class. So that's cool. I wore a shirt today that says "There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't." We covered binary in class Monday. Lots of students liked the shirt. Some commented on the survey. Several also asked how my cat is doing.
A selection from the comments: "I like your collection of shirts."
"Nice shirts -> always look forward to seeing them."
"I like your style. Good guy. Hope your cat is doing well."
"Keep up the same practices you have been using."
"That binary T-shirt is totally sweet. Very cool teacher. Need more jokes/talk more about stuff that isn't Discrete Math, like football or your cat. Good sense of humor, but rarely used."
"Good accessibility. Gnarly shirts!"
"Go Irish."
"A good job so far, but you don't need to spend so much time on the simple stuff."
"I like the way that you teach. I think you are doing a great job."