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Wow. I’m thrilled and heartened. Thank you!

I'll write more (hoping you'll forgive me) - but just a taster on one time side to this. You say that psych research often involves deceit. Made me realise that it virtually always involves pretending.

I used to do a class where we would look at a paper published that week and critique it. Always the starting point was to ask what the participants thought they were involved in. And usually, the paper fell apart at that point.

Those classes are the best as well.

I always enjoyed teaching that surprised students, but when they surprise themselves at how quickly they can become as good as the teacher, it's just a level up.

It's such a gift and I will fight to defend our profession. I don't even think it's a hard job honestly: they come to us to learn & all we have to do is not fuck it up, not bother them. Like means of transport: we don't have to do much specifically, but we enable everything provided we're not shit.

Conceptually hard. It's definitely physically and mentally difficult!

It's enormously hard to do it well. Even I, who match the stereotypical expectation that students have to a tee, found it draining, challenging. And every part of the process is increasingly set up to remove your agency and replace it by your obedience to someone else's model of learning.

It's probably one of my favourite things about work, but also exactly why I think it's a vector of all that bullying we receive when we are trying and we are good. Like those student evaluations which have been used here to fire people for example. 💔

Question as a student: how do we provide honest feedback on those stupid Likert scale reviews when an instructor really does need to improve an aspect of their teaching without it being used against them? And what happens if reviews aren’t returned?

I'm a few years out of it, so my insights might be out of date. While I was working, the two most direct routes were the feedback forms and a staff-student meeting (named variously) where course reps discuss things with the staff involved.

If the student reps were good, then those meetings had real teeth. "It's a great course; everyone is really interested. There's one thing to change that would really lift it to the next level. Could the lecturer please stop with his snide jokes in the lectures which are offending some students."

Beyond that, I don't know you can change much. The feedback forms are used as evidence for promotion, but in a very broad sweep: mean scores from probably less than half of the class will hide a lot.

At the end of a course, a document is produced that summaries everything - grade distributions, student feedback. The document identifies weaknesses and the course instructor has to specify what will be changed next time in response.

Without knowing what the types of issue you have, I'd say just use the forms as best you can.

Over the years, I saw performance issues that were easily resolved: speak slower, louder, listen to questions closer. I also saw attitude issues that were never really solved: disdain for students, or worse for a selected group of students; bored teaching; a "I know best" "do it my way" approach.

Some lecturers are narcissistic; some are authoritarian; some are pedantic. Some are scared, self-doubting. Some set their priorities elsewhere. All are working under a heavy pressure in a system that tightly constrains what they can do. And for many that means they are fighting against themselves.

Just to show you how far we've come, when I started there was a lecturer who thought teaching computers to women students was hopeless. They used to say in a lecture that women would only understand computers when they could attach an ironing board to them.

That's a breathtaking level of misogyny even for CS, it feels like. To say that in a _lecture_!?

In the 1980s, to be fair. But even then, yes it was shocking. It continued in various guises for decades and the uni was really only interested in containing any possible reputational damage.

This happens for a reason, etc.

I know. And I don't even know how I want to think about the issue. I keep coming back to the observation that universities have held on to structures - like the lecture itself - that were invented by men so that men could teach men.

At the heart of the design of a lecture theatre is an expectation of full obedience to authority. The space itself allows no possibility of anything other than deference to a hierarchy. Or, as can happen, riot. Those assumptions, hierarchy, authority, obedience, are the issue.

And this is where I am on very thin-ice. I want to say that it is predominantly men that can make all those assumptions work and not notice that those very structures militate against learning. And, ffs, that's what students are taught to expect: exactly those traits.

Here comes theatre again: When we stage our teaching against the grain of the dominant architecture, we are doing experimental theater (or, to be more generous, we nurture the radical possibility that inheres in all theater)!