by Laurie Henry

WHO KNOWS WHAT goes on in other people's classes? At other jobs where there are a whole lot of people in one place doing more or the less the same thing, it's not hard to know what everyone's up to. On the other hand, teaching generally takes place behind closed doors. One of my only chances to learn from my peers, unless I make a point of listening in to office-hour conferences, comes at the end of each semester, when I wait in the hallway for my students to fill out their course evaluation forms. It's always interesting to listen to other teachers in their classrooms. Who is the math professor who's so intriguing about differential equations? Who is the composition teacher who asks a question, waits a minute, and then answers it herself? Why aren't they doing their course evaluations too? Admittedly it's a haphazard way of picking up teaching tips.

Fortunately, I can now access free Web sites and read through the notes that undergraduates at over a hundred colleges and universities have taken in their classes and posted on-line for the aid of their absent classmates. These notes can bring me closer to knowing how students perceive what goes on in class -- and how the students' perceptions don't necessarily match my own.

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