Thinking about my last art school class:

My evals from my last art school class were very polarized – half very strong, half very negative – and though other instructors said that that wasn’t unusual, the dept. head said that they were among the worst, and called attention to certain wording from the negative evals and suggested that perhaps I was too intense with students, since usually comments on high standards and toughness are tempered by reflections like “But it was worth it.”

I agree with that, though I wonder if part of it is his projecting his own impressions onto the evals; I have noticed that at times in committee meetings I have come across as very task-focused and intense, and had noticed one time at one meeting that he seemed to perceive me that way.

That said, part of me also wonders if some of the results were the result of a one-time bad mix of students and departmental requirements that encourage poor results:

On the one hand, at least 2 students took the class b/c it seems like they didn’t want to take any required writing class at all and it seemed like the most interesting available, and several others weren’t ready for college level work because of very poor organizational skills and major learning disabilities.

On the other hand, the department didn’t prep me to expect those particular challenges or give me effective ways to address them, so I had to address them on the fly through multiple requests for assignment re-dos, then one-on-one meetings when a student had been given a chance to complete an assignment according to guidelines and still hadn’t.

Part of that, too, is that since the grading is “credit” ~ “no credit”, it’s not like I have the hammer of a grade or the ability to give very, very low grades for a shitty assignment, and instead am forced into either passing a student along, or making sure they complete assignments according to minimal standards.

 Overall, it seems like the major issue for me is how to deal with students who don’t put in a good faith effort, specifically how to get them to complete assignments according to minimal standards of professionalism and competency without resenting me.

One other instructor said to stress that rewrites are part of the process so that any requests like that are met without a 2^nd thought, but to me that’d make it seem like I’m setting myself up for more work, and even encouraging students to turn in a shitty first paper with no effort at all.

Additionally, during that 1^st term, I’m only on the art school campus one time a week, and that whole multiple re-writes expectation seems to assume that I’m around campus a lot and have the leisure to take up a lot of time for underperforming students who are actually students who are not putting in a good faith effort to begin with.

Thankfully, this semester’s group for the same class is like night-and-day.  After the 2^nd assignment – a mandatory re-write of the 1^st assignment – I could tell that every single student was putting in effort, and the class as a whole is totally gelling.

You know what’s crazy, though?

All of my current 7 students just got out of a writing class from last term, and only *one* had had an instructor give explicit structural advice on academic composition.

The rest just received some sort of vague advice like “Just write.”

Honestly, what’s happening in the rest of the classes that are being taught, I wonder?

Even though I had students complain, I saw serious progress with each and every one of them last term, not just the half of the students who wrote strongly positive evals.