CLASSROOM DATA REVEALS GRIMWADE’S TEACHING PROBLEMS.

I’d been talking about data visualization off and on for weeks in my infographics class, so perhaps I should not have been surprised when this infographic surfaced. A student, Shanna MacRostie, decided to track my vocabulary. Yes, I had told the students to collect data, but I did not intend it to be about me. The clever use of my favorite pencil, the Palomino Blackwing 602, is a reference to that frequently mentioned item. (https://www.johngrimwade.com/blog/2016/09/05/the-ultimate-pencil/)

Shanna’s comments: “It was a bit of a running joke in class that you often repeated certain words. You even commented on it yourself several times. I thought it would make a fun infographic project, so I decided to keep track of how often you used certain words/phrases over a four-week period. I simply marked down every time you said something that was on the list, and I ended up with two very full pages of data”.

Anyway, in terms of teaching, perhaps the worst terms to be using are: actually, I like it, nice, really interesting graphics. That is not useful feedback for students. Clearly, I will not be winning “Professor of the Year” anytime soon.

Please note: I said “actually” 58 times in a 55-minute class, and I have now developed a complex about it. But therapy can probably fix that.

This is my word cloud version from the full dataset.

I presented Shanna’s graphic at the IC16 conference in the Netherlands last March.

Now which room is that “How to teach” seminar in?