Self-Evaluation and Lessons Learned (Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View)

Attention conservation notice: Navel-gazing about teaching.

Well, that was exhausting. Everything seemed to take me at least as much effort and time as the year before, despite recycling a lot of material.

There continues to not be enough manpower to give detailed feedback on 90-odd students' weekly data analysis homework.

I had to abandon the quality-control sampling early on the semester, because there just wasn't time on my end. I regret this.

The second exam didn't work well at all; it will need to be replaced in the future. The students' struggles with it suggest that I ought to teach more about categorical data, but I'm not sure what I'd cut to make room for it.

This is all pretty negative, and indeed I'm fairly dis-satisfied with my own performance in teaching this, since it feels like I worked harder and the students didn't learn any more. But the student evaluations for the class and for me were much higher this year than before. I don't know whether this means I've started doing something right without realizing it, or forgotten something important, or indeed changed how I teach at all. But even the kids who ended the course hating my guts claimed they'd learned from it, so I'll count that as a win.

(The main thing to do at this point is to actually finish the book. The biggest job is going to be integrating the homework problems and the exams into the text. The most tedious job is going to be making sure the notation is uniform throughout.)

Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View