On Cloud 9: best teaching compliment ever

I haven't finished grading finals which means I also haven't read the exit papers I have students submit at the end of the semester to get an actual sense of their experience of the course as opposed to the insipidness of standardized course evaluation forms that most institutions distribute. Okay that's a bad dig. Perhaps those forms are okay but they don't really tell me much. They don't really work for me - maybe they do for others. But that isn't the point of this post.

I've been getting lovely notes from students about their experience having taken my classes. Since I'm still swamped with grading I don't quite have time to write the longer post - or perhaps series of posts - around my teaching experience this year. [I was a Visiting Professor at a prestigious private university in the Northeast area of these fine United States]. However I do want to share what I think is the best compliment of my teaching style which really is more of an unstructured seminar if we want to label it.

Color me giddy with happiness by this particular piece of praise! Why? By which I mean something other than the obvious reason that most of us, if not all, like being told how fabulous we are. When I started teaching in 1998 as part of a team-taught course that would convene as a large lecture and break up into recitation groups I knew how I wanted to teach - aka the unstructured seminar style which is how I learn best hence the desire to teach that way - but my craft was getting there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I didn't always know how to bring it together after letting it go. This past year I felt like I had some measure of control over my craft. I also felt like I learnt in the process. In fact, I'm quite impressed that I took the decision to significantly alter the syllabus for one of my classes a few sessions in. It was scary but I also thought I'd figured how it would work better given the configuration of the class in terms of the people and the relationships we'd begun to cultivate as part of a learning community. That this kind of praise came from someone in that very class makes it all the more sweet. Here it is - almost verbatim:

"I don't know how you did it but you let all of us contribute to the learning process. We'd start someplace, go all over, and then somehow you tied it all back together and at the end of each session we felt like we learnt stuff".

How cool is that?!