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Talk About Your Plenty, Talk About Your Ills
Notes on a good, old-fashioned insoluble educational quandary.
In recognition of the relieving new world that we find ourselves in, I am taking a pause in my political writing. At some point, continuing to screech while positive things are finally happening starts to sound…shrill. This one is about something completely different. Thankfully.
This piece is about a problem that I think about all of the time. It is a problem that I deal with every year in every class that I teach. It is a good problem. Let me describe it to you.
Every year, in the middle of the first marking period, I administer my students a (voluntary, anonymous) survey about their experience in my class. It’s not a long survey, but it is useful for me (and hopefully for them, too). It’s also nothing special: There are some anonymized demographic items (the class and period that the students are in) to help with data analysis. This is followed by a series of temperature-taking, Likert-type items about classroom culture and experience. Finally, there are three free-response, qualitative items: What structures are most useful? What structures are least useful? If you could make one change to the class, what would it be? And here is where the problem lies.
