Just Got My Student Feedback

Yay! I just got back my first semester’s students’ accumulated comments and feedback. My scores were all averaging around 4 out of 5, putting me in the strong B category. I think I was scoring higher than the department and faculty averages for most of the indicators as well… by only a slight margin in most cases, though. Still, I’m happy. I guess the people around me were right after all… I do have a gift for teaching – at least in this field of games. I got a lot of comments about me being approachable, friendly, patient and going the extra mile to help students with their problems.

Of course, nice as they sound, I am taking it with a pinch of salt… I get the feeling my scores were significantly boosted by two things this last semester – one, the program we used was unexpectedly causing a lot more problems, so students were desperately grateful for any help they received, and two, I had huge amounts of free time to help students with the problems, because I hadn’t yet started my own Master’s studies and research. That’s not going to be the case this coming semester onwards, so I do expect a slight drop in my scores from now on.

Then, of course, we come to the more interesting comments – about how I could improve.

While most of them indicated I was doing great, there were a few things which I thought were important. I got two complaints that sometimes my responses to emails were a bit slow. I think I recall about 4 times during the semester when that occurred. Two of those times, I frankly discount, because they emailed me on a Friday night or Saturday, asking me about something due on Sunday. If I didn’t check my office mail on the weekend (and I usually don’t), then of course I would have missed it. The other two times… yeah, fine. I dropped the ball a little there. Should send acknowledgements when I receive emails, rather than sit silently on it while waiting for an answer before replying. Still learning good email communications practices. It always seems to me to be rather useless to just say “Received, thanks”, when I haven’t got anything more to add, but I guess it reassures the sender that they’ve been heard, at least.

(Then again, I remember one group sending an email to me asking to meet up within a hour or two of the sending of the email. I still managed to scramble to meet them, but just how often do they expect me to check my mail?! I think this generation is becoming too used to Instant Messaging… I remember when I used to be happy if I got a reply within a week of sending an email. I still associate email more with a sped-up version of snail mail than a slowed-down version of MSN Messenger. That’s why I use it to send infrequent but long messages, rather than the one-liner conversations that most people are starting to use it for. But maybe I’m just an old fogey.)

The other repeated complaint (again, two) was that sometimes my words were too kind, and I didn’t point out critical problems with their projects, so the grades they finally got didn’t tally with the comments I made. Hmm… not much I can say about this. I think it’s a tradeoff, generally – if I used harsher critical comments, I would no longer be seen as more friendly and approachable. And for me, at least, the kind approach works better than the strict approach. I realised most of my students aren’t actually interested in continuing on to develop games in the future, so I thought at least getting them interested in games and having a (reasonably) pleasant exposure experience would be good for them, rather than raising the bar to professional standards they require in the industry. Still… I know several times I was plagued with doubts whether it was a good idea to let some groups proceed with a decision which I could foresee a lot of problems with. Most of the time, I let them decide on their own which direction they wanted to proceed in, but gave them feedback on the appropriateness of their course of action (or the benefits and pitfalls of it) after their decision was made. Still not sure if that’s the best idea or not.

I realised something in the course of teaching this semester. There exists such a thing as “design sense”, or “design judgement”. Some people have it – they can unerringly sense which of the myriad choices they face would turn out to be the most entertaining, or aesthetically-pleasing, or make the most sense to their audience. I had a couple of students like that in my classes – they were quite sure of their direction and what they wanted to achieve with their games, and their game ideas were always simple and achievable, but fun. With those kinds of students, it’s a pleasure to just sit back, outline the problems they have to face, and then watch them go at it. Reminds me of me in my younger days, even if I do say so myself. ^^

Some people are blessed with naturally good intuition and design sense – it’s inborn in them. For most others, I think it can be trained through repeated experiences – you gain insight from experience as a substitute for natural instinct. And I think part of my job is to help them gain that insight into design through experience, by letting them make their own choice, grappling with the unknowns and trying to accurately foresee what the pitfalls and benefits that lie ahead of any given option. That’s my policy behind why I prefer to let my students make their choices instead of telling them they should do it this way or that way. And even if they make mistakes, or travel down the wrong direction, I’ll try to hint to them what problems they’re going to face, and see if they can exercise judgement in pulling back or going around the problems.

But what do you do with people who are completely lacking any design sense at all? I had a group like that last sem. I simply didn’t know what to do with them. It was really weird – they had the usual mix of good ideas and bad ideas…  but for some reason, they almost always chose the bad idea over the good one. It’s not that they were lacking in good ideas, mind you – their brainstorming session threw up a couple of gold nuggets, I thought. But whenever I left them to their own devices and to make their own choices, they consciously, deliberately… chose the bad idea. And remained convinced it was a good direction. I mean, I tried to be fair and point out that there could be ways to get around the problems that they were going to face… in retrospect, maybe they took that as encouragement that they were heading down the right path, instead of a desperate attempt to salvage what could be saved. But I might as well admit that my system totally failed when it came to that group, and they were probably justified in voicing a complaint about my teaching. I wonder how other teachers handle this sort of problem? How do you teach the tone-deaf how to sing, or the colour-blind how to paint? Is it possible, or am I always doomed to lose a few students to this problem?