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Another great post, Maha! Of course I love to get positive feedback but it is usually the unhappy student who makes me grow the most. (That’s the label I use: unhappiness is the result of those factors you listed, plus others, too) … anyway, last semester I had a student who really hated my class. She never really explained why, so that made my task harder, and the result was that I made a TON of changes to my classes over winter break. Usually I wait until summer to make big changes, but I had a lot of ideas I had been thinking about, some of which I thought might (MIGHT) have helped this particular student get some value out of the class. I will never know if she would have gotten more out of the re-designed class… but her complete unhappiness is what made me put out the effort to change a lot of things for this semester, and I am getting happy feedback from students already about some of those changes. What’s really cool is having some returning students who were in my other class last semester who can see the “before-and-after” and give me feedback specifically about the changes. So, I still feel terrible for the bad experience that student had last semester, but there is some general karmic good here, benefiting other students anyway. I try to convey that message to students about the feedback they get on their writing also, since it is a very similar situation: the positive feedback is very sustaining, but it is the negative feedback that sometimes gives the greatest growth even when it can be really painful to hear, especially when you first encounter it and haven’t had time to process it as a message to grow from.

And I am so glad there will be Rhiz16 BTW. I will have a real agenda this time; HumanMOOC raised a lot of questions for me that I need to explore with other people’s help!