三代同堂

上个月去参加一个专业认证课程，在一群学员中认出一张似熟悉又有点陌生的脸。忍不住上前问他：“你是Dr. K吗？”对方点头说是。果然是当年念本科时的讲师，算一算，已经10年没见过他了。他说，他常在不同的场合遇见当年的学生，那种感觉很好，只是往往都是学生先认出老师。

第二天早上的茶点时间，一位学员走过来问我：“你是马大的讲师吗？”
“是。”
“你记得你教过我吗？”
“哪一门课呀？”
“Software Architecture。”
“哦！02年的，不太有印象了。当年我没有‘肥佬’你吧？”
“没有，我还考得挺好的。”
“谢天谢地！”

“三代同堂”的故事就这样不经意的发生在这城市的某个角落。

Ridiculous Comments

In each semester, students will do a course and teaching evaluation which allows them to evaluate every course they are taking in that particular semester. The students will have a chance to give feedback on how satisfied they are with the course, the lecturer who conducts the course, teaching and learning facility for the course, and their overall satisfaction. Basically, the students will fill in an online questionnaire for the evaluation. As for most questionnaire surveys, the students can give additional comments.

Very few students provide additional comments. Nevertheless, it is still a good chance for them to express their opinions and for me to know their views better. Normally, those who give comments just put down something very general like "make it easy to us", "OK", "need more examples" , etc. Even though quite "abstract", these comments do give me some hints on how to improve the course content and my teaching style as well as facility provided.

This semester, I was annoyed by two of the comments:

"Lecturer does not give feedback on students performance individually. And also reluctant to discuss students mark saying its confidential."

I have about 180 students in the class and still the student expected me to give feedback on individual performance? The marks are confidential - that is a fact, not an excuse that I made. Anyway, I attribute this problem to the student's ignorance .

The next comment is ridiculous:

"Hi you should do thing like labs and activities not only slides from the internet english should be the media(u)m of com. shame on um"

There was one lab session and a tutorial session every week. I didn't use slides in the class, let alone slides from the internet. English has been used as the medium of instruction since some years ago. What was the student trying to say? This is definitely not ignorance, it is stupidity.