@wilbowma during my second year review:
chair: "So the three students. Now was that this year, or last year."
me: "... it was both years.."
chair: "you can teach whatever you want but.. please.. double digits."
I think realistically as long as I am making an effort to get folks to enroll and hit nearly 10 it's fine, but if I continued to teach courses with 3-4 students they'd probably make me teach a "real" course.
@krismicinski @wilbowma that's impressive, anything below 12 gets cancelled here unless a student specifically requires *that* course to graduate
@csgordon @krismicinski @wilbowma our situation is similar to what Kris describes, eventually you get yelled at but they don't nuke courses proactively (in my experience at least)
@regehr @csgordon @krismicinski @wilbowma I was sure that nobody except my own PhD students would sign up for the niche grad seminar I taught this year, especially since I put zero energy into advertising it, but amazingly, it filled up and even had a waitlist
There were a bunch of drops once folks found out what it was, but still, double digits
@lindsey @regehr @csgordon @krismicinski @wilbowma When I took Phil Klein's "Optimization Algorithms for Planar Graphs" grad course at Brown, the first lecture started off standing room only and gradually tapered down to about 12. I still really want to ask the undergrads who left 45 minutes in what expectations they had from the course description that were unmet by the lecture. 🧐
