Reflecting On A Negative Teaching Experience
Find and describe an example of a negative experience/interaction with a course staff member. Include a reflection on what specific actions, assumptions, and/or factors made the experience/interaction negative and how it could’ve been handled better. Be prepared to talk about your examples in section next week.
When I was a student in CS61C in Spring 2019, the workload for the class was ridiculously high - the most workload I’ve had out of any class I’ve taken at Berkeley. In addition, there was a large discrepancy between the current offering of the class and how it was structured when Professor Garcia taught it — Garcia only had 3 projects instead of 5 long ones, fewer homeworks, fewer projects, and a significantly more generous grading curve. At one point late in the semester, tensions flared up between students and course staff — a student made a long Piazza post detailing all of their complaints about the course, and the head TA responded by essentially stating that CS61C was a high workload class by default, and while the course staff would try to change the structure of the projects and grading schedule to make things easier for students in the future, there wasn’t anything significant they could do about it currently. (This was a couple years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I think this was the general gist.) This caused more tensions, because I think the head TA had a different idea about the amount of time the projects were taking than the students, and there was a significant gap between what the TAs thought the students would be a able to handle and what the average student was actually capable of handling. Another thing that I think made the interaction worse was the tone of the TA - it was fairly removed and aloof, trying to reason about the workload of the class objectively while the issue had devolved into a very emotional matter at that point.
Eventually, the situation was resolved by the Professor himself, Professor Weaver, who committed to honoring the same grading curve that Professor Garcia had, while also promising that he would take all of the complaints and concerns to heart and make the class better for future iterations of the course. It was a genuine and heartfelt response, and it seemed to cool down tensions quite a bit. Because of the way Professor handled the matter in the end, I think most students were ultimately happy with how the class (and their grade) turned out.
uid: 202010020937 tags: #teaching