Why being a meteorologist in the classroom matters: the end of the semester feedback
A very short post
It is so extraordinarily meaningful to get so many comments like this one at the end of a semester.
I have about 1,000 of emails, cards and course evaluation comments since 2021 that express similar sentiments. I also some that weren’t so positive but they usually help me improve. Teaching is really meaningful work.
As a provost and dean, I thought about student success at a high level trying to implement best practices (e.g., creating active learning spaces) to move a metric, (e.g., retention and graduation). I call this “climate science” in that research helps understand the probabilities of how certain efforts affect a population of students.
As a professor, I had to become a “meteorologist” in the sense that each student is affected by complex local conditions that can’t be predicted by “climate science.” This is especially true
in a school like @UNCG with so much heterogeneity among students in nearly every dimension. Meeting students where they are is what I spend the vast majority of time doing as a teacher. This ain’t easy in a class of 150 students.
I worry that implementing research-based practices, although positive, can make a professor complacent regarding the variation in each student’s “meteorological” environment. The Purdue-Gallup poll supported the “meteorology metaphor” since it has shown that having a professor that cared about a student can be the best predictor of their success as alumni.