New Information on Myself

This week is course evaluation week.

I HATE COURSE EVALUATIONS!!!!

After I handed them out to students and left the room, my good upbeat mood crashed to the pits. What horrible things will those people say about me? Will my good intentions, herculean efforts to provide a well-rounded education, and good faith, be hammered into nothing? My mood plunged and I have fought feeling sad for the rest of the day.

Perhaps I am harking back to some years ago when I received incredibly shocking evaluations: "Barbara is condescending and hard to approach. She shouldn't be teaching." "She is stiff and unapproachable." "The instructor doesn't have the personality to be a teacher."

I wasn't surprised. I was floored. I had almost always received positive teaching evaluations. If people didn't like me, they did like the class at least. These evaluations were something completely different than anything I'd seen before. While there were two students in the class who had skipped out often and got bad grades on substandard work, others were collegial, interested, motivated, and participatory in class. Suddenly I felt stabbed in the back. I had no idea. And the ideas expressed were extremely denigrating. It was not the academic requirements, assignments or tests. The problem was me. I couldn't believe it.
I still don't.

No one is perfect, especially me. But the comments made about me didn't come close to reality, nor were they merely opinions of students. I wondered if they came from a disgruntled individual who wrote in her comments onto student surveys before they were sent in to central administration. But since they were then sent on to an outside agency for compilation and analysis, it was not possible to get them to examine so I could prove my hypothesis. To this day I feel the shock and overwhelm I had when I opened those evaluations.

So today, when I returned to the classroom after the evaluations were taken off to the department secretary to deal with, I slumped into an emotional heap on the inside. Yes, we continued to laugh and have an animated conversation about research. But I had then, as I do now, a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. How horrible a person will I be described as now?

Of course, this is just a reaction to an earlier unfortunate experience. But I do not think my experience is unique, in that a round of really bad evaluations can be devastating. I doubt that many non-academics understand how vulnerable and helpless a professor can feel in the face of course evaluations regardless of whatever experience, credentials, publications, or other scholarly characteristics one may have. Suddenly we are at the mercy of students--some of whom are angry because you held them to the line. Others, because they chose to share something of a private nature in class and you moved the class along because it was neither time nor place to have that kind of conversation. Still others were angry because they did not think that their internet surfing in class for the entire quarter qualified them for a drop in their grade. So we do what we think is right and wait for the onslaught. We finish up the semester on a high note, feeling pleased that so many students earned high grades, or that the papers were of superior quality. Students give hugs as they leave and thank us as they leave on the last day, citing events in class that have been formative in their thinking. Then we get their evaluations a month later and wonder how we could have missed what they have charged us with.

A story by a client illustrates the shock, shame, and confusion that is associated with these evaluations. Kay* grew up in a modest home outside New York. Her father was a mechanic for a famous singer; his mother a laundress. There were three active, happy kids in the family. Kay remembers her young life as very happy: mass every week, family meals and traditions, grandparents and lots of aunts and uncles on the weekends. One day her father came home with the Famous Singer who took a liking to her very quickly. "Can I take your picture with me?" So Kay stood next to him, held his hand, smiled, and had her picture taken with him. He was gone right after the picture was taken, but Kay was so dazzled by being with a famous person--who wanted to be with her--that she didn't mind. Life was good and Kay grew up feeling very satisfied about her young life.
Two weeks ago Kay decided to go through a big box of family memorabilia that had been left behind when her father died. After looking over several packets of papers, she came across the picture of herself and the Famous Singer standing hand in hand in her front yard. The caption under the picture read, "Won't you help unfortunate young girls? Without your contributions, Kay doesn't stand a chance." She had been the poster child for poverty prevention in New York City. She'd had no idea. In one moment, she slid into doubt about everything she had ever known and felt about her life.

The magnitude is different, but the idea is the same. Things that creep up on a person are not easy to take, especially when that information causes one to question everything they know about themselves. So whether that is a course evaluation, finding a letter from one's parent after their death, or an old newspaper clipping. There are good reasons that evaluations sit in a drawer unread until teachers no longer remember the names on the course roster that year; or why we don't examine and memorize everything that our parents leave to us. It is an interesting life, this. And how we think about ourselves can be a fragile thing sometimes.

*Kay is a pseudonym.