I’m wrapping up my first semester as a legit college professor, and that means my first round of student evaluations. Here’s what my Intro to Music Tech students at Montclair State University had to say about me.
The creation of original music was a big hit, predictably. Everyone in the class is from the classical pipeline, and producing pop tracks was well outside of their comfort zone. After their initial resistance, though, everybody quickly got caught up in it, and I started having to chase them out of the room at the end of class. People thought I was a supportive and effective songwriting teacher, which is nice. A student wanted to learn more about song structure. I would like to teach more about it. In general, this is something I plan to start doing on day one in future semesters.
I also got rave reviews for talking through Beatles and Michael Jackson stems. Classical musicians don’t often get exposure to the creative use of the recording studio. Those stems are a rich resource for examining songwriting, arrangement, recording, mixing and editing. I wish I didn’t have to acquire them illegally from the shadiest corners of the internet.
One student was strongly in favor of talks on music philosophy. This was a pleasant surprise; I was wondering whether anyone besides me gets value out of that. However, the student then complained:
I wish we learned more audio recording instead of all MIDI. It’s more practical for a majority of the class.
This is a fair point. There were some practical obstacles to my dealing seriously with audio recording. One was time. Another was logistics; it’s not easy to teach recording to sixteen beginners in a single room three hours a week. But I could have tried harder to figure something out, and I will in the future. I disagree that audio recording will be more practically valuable to these kids than MIDI in the future. I had them do a lot of manipulating clips in the DAW because they are likely to do more creating that way.
A student complained about not getting enough exposure to software beyond GarageBand and Logic. That is also a fair point, and purely the result of being time constrained. The students arrived with a very wide range of technical backgrounds, from total novice to fairly advanced. The beginners had a hard enough time with GarageBand that it would have been cruel to inflict Pro Tools, Ableton or Reason on them. For example, there was this student, who gave me a “meh” review overall.
I loved the Demonstrate & Discuss projects. I thought it was great that you gave us creative liberty in the majority of this course. This is not my favorite subject, but this free range of topics really got my interest and got me engaged in the course. You were also very supportive throughout the songwriting process. It was hard to keep up in this class as a complete beginner with Logic and GarageBand. There could have been a lot more guided instruction with these programs.
I agree, but then what about the advanced kids? I took the approach of throwing everyone into the deep end and having them frob around, and I deputized some of the advanced students to be unofficial teaching assistants. I recognize that this method of learning doesn’t suit everyone, but it does work well in a large group.
A student complained that I departed wildly from the syllabus, which made it hard to know what was going on. True that. The syllabus itself is very much a work in progress, and I did a lot of responding to the students’ evolving needs and interests. The syllabus was heavy on student presentations, and those took much longer than expected because I liked to use them to launch discussions. But that cut into our limited time, and I share the students’ frustration over it.
I wish we spent more time working the software. Too many presentations!
It’s complicated, though. Another student complained about there being too many presentations, but also wrote that they were one of the best parts of the class, because they exposed everyone to a wider range of ideas, and because they were good public speaking practice. So, it’s always a tradeoff.
Here’s how the ratings broke down:
- Overall rating of the instruction: High to Very High.
- Overall rating of the course: Average to Very High.
- Effectiveness of the instructor in stimulating your interest in the subject: Average to Very High.
- Rate the effectiveness of the course in challenging you intellectually: Average to Very High.
- Before taking this course my interest in the subject was: the full gamut from Very Low to Very High.
- Estimate how much you learned in the course: Some to Very Much.
Finally, one student complained that if the class hadn’t been held at 8:30 in the morning, they would have been able to attend more lectures. That really seems like it was within your control, dude.