I have arrived!

W00t! After semesters of teaching I am now finally an official professor: I have “a rating at ratemyprofessor.com”:http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=753498! Apparently I am a good teacher, although exactly why is still a little unclear. Indeed, sometimes the comments verge on the enigmatic, such as the line “one of the books he has chosen for the class is very different from other books.”

I rate a 4.8 out of 5, which is pretty good. In fact, it is higher than most of the other professors in my department. But don’t get too excited, though — I am also one of the few in my department who has not earned the coveted chili pepper before their name to indicate that they are ‘hot.’ Transference: it’s complicated.

I know some professors harbor considerable resentment to sites like Rate My Professor for one reason or another, but I’m just happy that someone cared enough about my course to register an opinion one way or the other. I’m even more delighted that the opinion was a good one. However I also found out today that one section of my intro anthro course is full and I haven’t even finished teaching the ones for this semester. Perhaps I should try to be scarier so I can get smaller class sizes where a discussion-based format would work better?