Just finished reading through and collating themes from my student feedback from teaching Logic last semester

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Just finished reading through and collating themes from my student feedback from teaching Logic last semester. I know some people hate student evaluations, but I find reading the written comments so valuable. I am touched that students take such time to give sometimes quite granular feedback for a course that they will never take again. One does need a thick enough skin to deal with the negatives (I talk too fast and use quite complex language, which, yes). Even when students contradict each other, with the same aspect of the course described both positively and negatively, that's a valuable reminder that our students are a diverse bunch and what works for one may not work for another! @academicchatter

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@RanaldClouston @academicchatter mostly I feel the same way, and my reviews are overall good. But sometimes I have some lower-level ugrad class where all the comments are things like "fine" or "I don't know why they make us learn functional programming." Those I feel frustrated by :-) at one point someone wrote (paraphrasing): I am appalled by the quality of my peers--the other comments will probably be critical of the prof because students don't want to do anything hard. That was a funny one...

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@krismicinski @academicchatter "I don't know why they make us learn functional programming" - as someone who used to get exactly that comment a lot, but doesn't get it so much these days now I've changed how I approach my motivation material, do you explain why you teach them functional programming? If you do, is there a reason why students do not find the explanation convincing? (Of course, you do not have to convince all of them; if you have an explanation that is convincing to most but not to a minority, that might be OK. Not everyone in society needs to care about functional programming). One thing I've become much more conscious and comfortable about over the years is that many students do not have the same sort of intrinsic motivation for learning new concepts that I have (and probably anyone silly enough to become an academic has) so I need to give extrinsic motivation, where it exists.

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