PSS Overload and Evaluations

I don't think that I realized until now how mentally exhausting the PSSes are. Normally we have Tuesdays "off" so to speak, because seminars don't require nearly as much preparation nor participation in comparison. But now that we've had three PSSes in a row, all I can say is that I am very grateful that we don't usually have them every day in a row like this! Today's PSS went over transcription, and for some reason there were way more questions than usual. We managed to finish them in time, but just barely, and we were definitely feeling rushed. Normally, there are only three to four pages of questions, but today there were five pages. Wow, that was way too much.

In other news, we have received evaluations from all of our group members now, and also from our facilitator. As I've explained before, the evaluations are supposed to tell you about your strengths and also about the areas that other people feel you should try to improve. The student evaluations are anonymous unless the students choose to put their names in the comment section. My group members were only evaluating me on professionalism, but the facilitator was also evaluating us on our knowledge and contributions to the group as well as our professionalism. I think that my group members and facilitator did a decent job with the evaluations. I already had a pretty good idea about what my biggest weaknesses were, and several of them agree with me. The funny thing though is that there were a few comments from different people that were total polar opposites. I guess that means that I'm probably doing about right in those areas!

Anyway, some of my classmates had been concerned that the student evaluations would be nasty or cruel, but they weren't like that at all. I thought that several of them were actually very helpful, because I hadn't thought about some of these issues. Sometimes you really need someone to point certain things out to you (in a nice way, of course). I got a few evaluations that were extremely detailed, with specific examples of things that those people thought I did well or could have done better, and those were the ones that were the most helpful. Even this business of writing evaluations is a work in progress. My group is going to spend some time on Friday talking about how we can work even more effectively as a group, although we all agree that we've come a long way since a month ago.