Responding to negative student feedback: retain your confidence, improve your teaching

Image by skeeze from Pixabay. The Guardian recently published an article by an anonymous academic entitled ‘Student surveys are destroying my confidence’. The writer reports that ‘our mandatory student feedback surveys are crushing [my] confidence. They report that I seem “inexperienced” and the block that I teach is “uninteresting”.’ This criticism means that ‘rather than being guided through the …

Down With This Sort of Thing

On 19th January 2017 there was something of a kerfuffle among academic Twitter. Someone tweeted this slide (pictured above) which was apparently being shown by a 'top QM biologist' as advice to junior academics. Entitled 'Make Science the Centre of Your Life', the slide says: Do it as well as if it was [sic] a matter …