My Favorite One-Liners: Part 108

In this series, I’m compiling some of the quips and one-liners that I’ll use with my students to hopefully make my lessons more memorable for them.

Today’s post marks the final entry in this series. When I first came up with the idea of listing some of favorite classroom quips, I thought that this series might last a couple dozen posts. To my surprise, it instead lasted for more than 100 posts. I guess that, in my 21-year teaching career, I’ve slowly developed my own unique lexicon for communicating mathematical ideas, and perhaps this parallels (on a decidedly smaller scale) what a radio talk show host (like local legend Randy Galloway, who was a sports reporter/commentator in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for many years before retiring) does to build rapport with his/her audience.

I’ll use this final one-liner near the end of the semester when it’s time for students complete their evaluations of my teaching. Back in days of yore, professors would take 10-15 minutes to pass out paper copies of these evaluations, students would complete them, and that would be the end of it. In modern times, however, paper evaluations have switched to electronic evaluations, which are perhaps better for the environment but tend to have a decidedly lower response rate than the old paper evaluations. Still, I value my students’ feedback. So I’ll tell them:

Please fill out the student evaluation; the size of my raise depends on this.

After the laughter settles down, I’ll tell them, “Who’s joking?” I can’t say this happens everywhere, but I can honestly say that my department’s executive committee does consider student evaluations of teaching when deciding on the quality of my teaching, and that partially determines the size of my annual merit raise. (The committee also considers other indicators of good teaching other than student evaluations.)

It’s important to note that I don’t tell my students to give me a good evaluation; I just ask them to fill it out and to be honest with their feedback. I also tell them, forgetting my raise, I also want to hear from them about how the semester went. If it went great, I want to know that. If it sucked, I also want to know that. However, if they think the class sucked, just writing “This class sucked” doesn’t give me a lot of information about how to fix things for the next time that I teach the course. So, if they have a criticism, I ask them to give me specific feedback so that I can consider their critiques.

A couple years ago, I served on my university’s committee for reconsidering the way that we conduct student evaluations of teaching. To my surprise, when I interviewed students in focus groups, there was a general consensus that students believed that their evaluations were a waste of time that didn’t actually contribute anything to the university — or if they did contribute something, they had no idea what it was. Ever since then, I’ve made a point of telling my students that their evaluations really do matter and can make a difference in future offerings of my courses.