right

Emily, you're right.

I do tend to discount comments that have "crap" or other coarse words in them. While there's a time and a place for those words, a class evaluation is not it. (I wonder how he would feel if I wrote him* a recommendation and used the word "crap" in it in some capacity.)

I once asked the secretary (who is charged with typing these up so we can't guess who wrote them from handwriting) if there was ever a comment she "censored" or chose not to type. She said there was one, it pertained to a person who taught some of the medically-related classes and who was very fit and toned - the comment had something to do with a student saying he'd like her (the teacher) to come to class naked some day, but it was even ickier than that, according to the secretary.

Seriously. I do think most people don't understand how to do critiques of things these days - it's all either fawning praise (I don't even bother to read the "reviews" of new quilting books in my quilting magazines because they're all just unqualified plugs) or it's tearing to shreds (but even worse than that: tearing to shreds with included ad hominem attacks). It's really not unlike the tone a lot of politics have taken on - you cannot disagree with someone's IDEAS, you have to tell the world how he is a crook or a liar or is in some other way an unsavory person. (And while I'd like to know if the person I might be electing is an unsavory person or not, still, it doesn't tell me much about a candidate if all he's doing is running down his opponent).

I also never wrote "mean" things on my evaluations - and I had some profs I really hated, including one who probably violated a university rule about nepotism (hiring a spouse to tutor in the class, and then seemingly intentionally making the exams very difficult) and another who was openly rude in class and to everyone who came to his office hours looking for help on a difficult topic. But I rarely wrote about those kind of things, unless it was to comment on something that I thought could be improved.

I actually wrote a lot of "nice" comments, now, I realize. And I realize that though they may not be "helpful" in the sense of being a tool for improvement, they do kind of help to let the prof know there's someone who appreciated the class.


(*Okay - and this may offend some of you - but I'm going back to the generic "he" and "him" when I don't know the gender of a person. It gets too cumbersome to say "he or she" and then continue on from there. In grade school I was taught that the male pronouns were the "generic" pronouns - in other words, when you didn't know, or there was a mixed-gender group, you used the male pronoun. I know some of the Romance languages still do that, despite attempts at PC-izing. [I'd love to see a PC gender-"equality" crusader who is all hepped up about "inclusive language" go head to head with some of the crustier members of the Academie Francaise on that topic. I know that French is (was? at least it was when I was learning French) one of the languages where you used the generic male pronoun.)