This Thank You is for my Students

On Monday I attended a nice ceremony to receive an award for being among a group of faculty that have “left a mark on our students”.  Apparently this puts me in the top 5% of faculty over the 70 year history of our university system at the Tecnológico de Monterrey here in Mexico.

Obviously those of us with a large number of semesters (and total number of groups taught) have an advantage, or I think that would be true. It is also obvious that the more recent semesters have more students and also more students that are connected to the internet in order to hear about the voting and cast their vote.

But you know what?  I’m going to just be happy that my students took the time to enter the survey and include my name in their list of professors they wanted to honor.

As usual, the most important part of the evaluation for me is the chance to look at the student comments. Every semester we receive teaching evaluations and I always dig into the comments (positive and negative) in an effort to improve my teaching going into the next semester.

So in addition to the statue pictured above and the certificate which I should get framed soon, two pages of comments were included with my award. Thank you everyone for taking the extra time to not simply vote but include comments for myself and my fellow colleagues receiving this award.  I really should take time to translate these to English and perhaps I will soon after this rush of exam week.  For now, I include scanned images of the documents here.

I’m truly lucky to be doing something I love every day: teaching.

I am also happy to have had my family with me for the event. My youngest told me that all the talking was “boring” but I know from experience that he will remember events like these; I still remember many of the events that I attended for my parents.