Teaching evaluations

I spent some time last night going through my old teaching evaluations so that I could put some information about them in my job applications. Here are some of the best responses to, "What do you consider to be the strongest and weakest features of the instructor, as a teacher?"

Positive comments are usually pretty similar, just variations on "great teacher." But occasionally a student will be more creative with their praise:

• "No weaknesses, she's divine!"
• "Very responsible"
• "She made the class tolerable"
• "Put up with my pedantic questions"
• "I only took this class b/c I didn't want to take [biological psychology]. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."
• "She was really patient when students made stupid comments"

But you can't please everyone:

• "She should walk around a bit more while she's lecturing" 
• "Needs to stop walking around so much, it's distracting"

Some complaints really have to be taken with a grain of salt:

• "There is far too much in this course that lacks scientific reliability and validity"
• "Office hours too early. I shouldn't have to be on campus at 10am"

And my personal favourite:

• "I think the TAs are having sex" 

This wins on so many levels. Either this person didn't actually read the question, or they have some interesting theories about how teaching ability is related to sexual activity (and the sexual activity of people other than the teacher, no less!). Although, there's no judgement about it, so I can't tell if this student thought that the (imagined) relationship between my TAs was a strength or weakness of my teaching. Perhaps they meant it as a compliment.