Last week I taught a course called Creative Writing Using Constraints, aka the Oulipo, or workshop of potential literature.

The evaluations were mostly positive (see below), although one person wrote that they’d have liked more writing exercises. Wouldn’t we all? But given that the course was, in effect, just over four and a half hours long, each intro to an exercise takes around ten minutes, an exercise itself takes perhaps 15 minutes, and the subsequent discussion lasts between fifteen and 30 minutes, I don’t see how more could have been squeezed in. I do believe the discussion, involving as it does learning from others on the course, is crucial. We got through four or five techniques in depth, and touched on several more. Still, whoever it was who wrote that gave me high marks for things like knowledge, class management, and all that.

I think evaluations are very odd devices to be honest. Someone once “marked me down” on her evaluation of a one day course I was running on the grounds that the traffic was terrible. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t in charge of local traffic conditions and that she should complain to the council. Mind you, what can you expect, when someone who was inspecting a training session I was running told me that it wasn’t as good as it could have been because she had difficulty finding a parking place. I asked her why she thought that was my responsibility and what it had to do with my competence in running the session. She was unable to answer.

Assessment is always tricky, because you can quite easily end up assessing something other than the thing you think you’re assessing. For example, one of the things that exams test is the ability to perform well in exams.

In a slightly differtent context, when I’m practising the sax at home it often goes quite well. But as soon as I’m called upon in the sax lesson to toot my horn while everyone listens, it is liable to go to pot. Either I play the wrong notes altogether or the right notes in the wrong order (cf Eric Morecambe), or the right notes cacophonously. So what’s being tested at least partly is my the state of my nerves. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Here are those evaluations I mentioned: