Evaluated

I dislike reading the student evaluations.

(Even this morning, getting up, realizing they'd be waiting for me when I came in, I felt kind of anxious and pukey).

I'm not sure why; they're never very BAD. Or at least, if there's a negative comment, there are positive comments to balance them out (but it's the negative ones I remember, that come and niggle at me when I lie in bed at night).

I do get a lot of complaints about "too much work" or "too much information," but you know? I sometimes tend to discount those. Especially when I have students who went on to grad school coming back and thanking me for all the detailed information. I don't know. For one of my classes (the one I get the most "too much work" complaints in), it's hard to cut down - it's an important "majors" class, really kind of a capstone for these folks, and I feel the need to be very detailed and to have a certain level of rigor.

And in my non-majors class, I got one comment asking for fewer assignments and another asking for more. Which I assume to cancel each other out, meaning I'm probably doing things the right way (or as close to the "right way" as you ever can. You're never going to please everyone).

I had a friend in grad school who said if she was getting equal amounts of complaints and praise from the students, she figured she was "shooting down the middle" just right: too much praise suggested to her she was "too easy" or trying to hard to be their friend; too many complaints meant she wasn't doing what she should as a teacher. (I wish I had that kind of self-confidence; the complaints to me are still like little needles).

I did get two comments in one class that were VERY positive, that said how much they learned and how well I paced the class. But then, I got another one that basically said, "I'm never going to use this crap. Why did I have to learn it? This class was too hard."

Could you please rephrase that first sentence in the form of a constructive criticism? I mean, how does it help me to learn that you believe you're never going to use the "crap" I taught? (and never say "never," my friend.)

I think that's one of my biggest issues with student evaluations: people do not know how to constructively criticize. There is useful criticism: for example; "I had a really hard time reading what was written on the chalkboard. In the future using overhead projector might work better." or "There was not enough time given to complete the assignments; they need to be made earlier." Something I can DO something about. (And what's even better? If someone has a problem if they come to me or email me DURING the semester so I can actually correct the problem then and there. I mean, I ask if everything's going well during class, but I know some people are too shy to speak up).

But someone telling me, "I'm never going to use the crap I learned in this class" - well, that frankly tells me more about the person writing the statement than it does about my teaching style. (And if the class really IS useless to a majority of the people who are required to take it, that is not my call; that has to be something discussed with the department chair and the department as a whole).

But that's so often what you see in the negative comments - not specific things that can help us improve (I also had a student in my non-majors class say, "I don't like science, I'll never like science, so I can't think of anything to suggest for this class"), but either lashing out or complaints.

And, by the same token: praise is nice. It makes me feel good that people learned a lot in my class, or that they thought I was a kind person, but it doesn't really help me to improve (other than, maybe, to let me know that I'm doing okay). One student did say that he or she liked how I would regularly explain how the current material related to what they had previously learned, which is helpful, because it tells me that that's something I should continue to do and maybe enhance in the future.

But I find it hard to know what to do with the evaluation comments. Part of me wants to totally discount them, say "a lot of these people are people who slacked off in class, who expected to be allowed to hand in assignments late, who plagiarized" and therefore probably don't make a fair assessment. And part of me wants to go very John Houseman in The Paper Chase and remind the students that it's a tough world out there, jobs in the sciences are few, and you're a lot more likely to get the career you want if you work hard and take all the opportunities you can get to learn and gain experience and knowledge.

But then again, part of me wants to sort of curl up and die and go "but they HATE me!!!!" I admit it, I have delusions of being the professor on campus that everyone loves, that everyone wants to take the classes of - all of that damn Mr. Chips stuff.

So it's hard to have those two competing philosophies - especially in a world where, by and large, hard work isn't particularly valued (if you question that, look at the lives of the celebutantes, look at the popularity of playing the lotto for "big winnings"). It's a tough sell to tell people on the first day of class, "You will be reading hard books. You will be expected to go to the primary literature. You will be expected to do research on your own."

And the fact is? I'm just not charismatic enough as a person to make people work hard (if they're not already into that) and love it. I'm not a Jaime Escalante or any of those other "hero teachers" that they make movies about. And I don't know how to BECOME that kind of charismatic person who can push people until they're at absolutely their outer limits of ability and comfort and still make them love it. The fact of the matter is, if someone isn't already internally motivated by the time they get to my class, I'm not going to instill that in them.

I wish that I could. If there were one thing I could change about myself, it would be that - to somehow understand better how to relate to people, to light that fire in them. But just as I fail to get that people are joking sometimes when they are - and respond in earnest, which is either awkward or embarrassing - I kind of think I also lack the charisma gene.

So I don't know. It's hard to give up the childish delusions-of-grandeur and accept that I'm good but not great (and will never be great) and that no matter what I try to do to improve, there are still going to be people who sit there like lumps and who complain that they'll "never use the crap they learned" in my class. (And yeah, I know, I'm personalizing it, and I should accept that it's them, not me - but I still deep down have this Save The World mentality where I think that if I were just a bit better, or a bit more exciting, or a bit more SOMETHING, people would have these epiphanies where they'd never again believe that anything they were learning was useless "crap.")