I could only remember the name of one CompSci professor at McGill who's still there, and their comments would be like mine -- brilliant guy, but he should pass more people.

Now I'm looking up a college friend, and they're not being nice to her at all. Ouch.

Hah. The ratings for my Dad's 110 are not good. I'm not surprised. It is a class students often take to fulfill a science req, thinking it will be easy, with no math or physics. It isn't. My dad's style is lecture and q&a and he is a bit of a hardass. From what I heard from my friends who went to that school, students either loved the class, or hated it and him with a passion.

snork. I just looked up my favorite professor from grad school.

so boring and lazy. he is the type of teacher that just sits there and lets the students do all the work. i think he is just a****who likes sappy victorian literature and has no real desire to do the work of teaching it. he wants you to read it and then show up to class and like cry about how beautiful it was like those women on the Oprah Book Club. let's just say his "teaching style" isn't my style.

I found this about my Spanish prof:

He looks just like Antonio Banderas, only smarter. He is a great prof, and has an amazing

As I recall, he's actually a lot better-looking than Antonio Banderas, and now I'm wondering what the missing amazing is.

(He's a biologist by training, and teaches--or did 13 years ago--Spanish part-time for extra money, so his technique was totally different from any language teacher I'd ever had. More conversational, and with a lot more slang.)

One of my friends teaches at a small university near here. This rating suits him to a T:

A cool prof who now looks more eccentric. He's extremely knowledgeable and his internet notes and sourcebook were extremely helpful. The only problem was his barn door once in a while opening...

This is one for a former prof and the husband of a friend. I may have to email it to her:

god damn i dunno what the deal is with y'all saying angus aint hot. homies is straight up supafly. i'ma have a beard just like him when i grow up. but for real for real he's the number one lecturer in the whole thang. sorry marty's dad, much respect to you but A-Mac is holding it down. His explanations are straight up on point. Much love.

The Irish ratemyteacher site was in the media a lot earlier in the year. Teachers' unions were trying to get it shut down, and couldn't. It was massively popular with students, and a lot of other people, as there's no actual assessment of teaching by any independent body in Ireland.

I don't think my ratings would be good. Mainly because my class is hard.

Last night at conferences, a kid said he stopped doing work becauseit was boring sometimes.

I looked at his dad and smiled and said, "Imagine if you said to your boss, 'I'm sorry. I'm not going to do any of that work anymore. It's boring.'"

At least dad understood.

Yeah, Rick, I wouldn't write that about my teacher unless I wanted to boink him.

I think that the boink-wanting is unlikely, because I am generally the recipient of chaste crushes, but I know faculty who get a lot of that. When my friend (Dr. A.) and I (Dr. B) started as new professors, he had a bad-boy image and he would get steamy sexual comments from female students on his student evaluations. When I got personal comments they were never overtly sexual, and they usually had a gloomy fatalism about them. The contrast bothered me at the time.

For instance:

What did you like best about this course?

Dr. A. was SO HOT! Gimme some of that!

Dr. B. was really smart, and he made me laugh every day. My roommate is pretty sure that he's married. I guess it doesn't matter if he's married. It's never going to matter. How could it?

Or:

What could the instructor do to improve the class?

For Dr. A.: He could invite me to spend a weekend in the Bahamas with him after the class is over! Woo Yeah!

For Dr. B.: He could dump that pretentious blonde girl I've seen him with. Why would he like her? I hate that girl. Men are stupid.

It was a hard lesson to learn. Some men inspire lust. Others, just a transient sense of ennui.

It is *cold* here right now. Hmph.

My Firefox weather thingy says it's climbed up to 30 degrees. Which is less than balmy.