After a brief recess due to weird things happening at work and Carolyn's health issues, I have once again signed up for a class at the local American River College. Actually, I signed up for two classes but couldn't get into the Ceramics class - I was 11th on the wait list when the class started and apparently there were so many who went the first class trying to get in that the professor blocked any further online registrations.
The class I did get into - Film genres, Science Fiction - was a mistake so I have already dropped it. The class sounded interesting in the catalog (don't they all?) but at the first session it became ringingly clear to me that I would not be enjoying my time there and probably not be learning anything I wanted to learn. Since the only reason I am taking these classes at this stage in my life is to learn something, to enjoy myself, or to meet wonderful people - I had to question what I was doing in this class. As usual, I was the oldest in the class and, it turned out, the only one who hadn't seen at least half the movies listed in the syllabus. Dummy me, I thought we would be learning about the genre not just regurgitating what we had already seen.
But worse, the instructor was late, a little short tempered, and appeared to want to concentrate on less important details of the films we'd be reviewing rather than the story lines, philosophy, or even production techniques. After the class I checked the guy out on Rate My Professors.Com. I should have done this earlier and saved myself an evening. A full 90% of his raters had listed him as the poorest teacher they'd ever had.
I reviewed the catalog to see if I had overlooked some interesting courses available on my free evenings and found one - Introduction to Archaeology and World Prehistory. This time I checked out the instructor and found she is rated very high by her students - not an easy teacher but an interesting and helpful one. And what's also great is that this class doesn't start until February 2 so I haven't even missed a class yet.
Rate my professor dot com can be a bit more negative than reality indicates. It's a self selected sample, and angry students are more likely to self select than satisfied ones, but that low would be a bad sign.
ReplyDeleteLee is probably right, but if a teacher is really good the students will post about them. Lisa and I both had a great history teacher at UCSC, so I decided to check his rating, he had over 50 posts and an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. Mind you he was exceptional, but the good teachers still get noticed.
ReplyDeleteSelf-selected doesn't automatically imply negativity. I know that once I found the site, I rated all my community college professors since I thought the better ones deserved to be reviewed as much as the not so good.
ReplyDeleteI also find the comments as worthwhile as the rating, if not more so. We all know that hard doesn't equal bad or easy, good.
That's why I liked that they don't include the hardness in their overall score.
ReplyDelete