If I Could Stick My Pen In My Heart/And Spill It All Over the Stage: Teaching Evaluations

If I could win ya, if I could sing ya

A love song so divine

Would it be enough for your cheating heart

If I broke down and cried? If I cried?

"It's Only Rock n' Roll (But I Like It)," Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1974

In the past week or so, as many of us have been putting together classes for the new semester, teaching evaluations have arrived.  I suspect they arrive electronically at most places now, as that is substantially cheaper for the institution. At Zenith we switched over from a paper system, where students filled them out together in one of the final classes, to an online one in which they fill them out alone and receive access to their grade for the course only after having done so. Like everyone else, students are bowling alone.

But I like it, like it, yes I do.  Photo credit.

I have thought for years that fall teaching evaluations, received as the promise of the new spring semester dawned, can have a particularly discouraging effect on new teachers.  One curious phenomenon is that practically everybody I know can get 99% great to good teaching evaluations, and the one nasty evaluation can have a particularly devastating effect.  Regardless of how incoherent it is, or how wrong, an anonymous student cutting you off at the knees about a course that you poured yourself into can feel like a stab in the back.

Because, of course, it is.  It was intended to be.  Or, at least, it's hard to imagine the student furrowing hir brow and thinking, "So how can I say how much I loathe you in a constructive and empathetic way?"

So without further ado, let's talk about how to read teaching evaluations, being hurt by comments, and what your own assessment of the student evaluations you receive has to do with being a good teacher.

Remember that they are students.  While students can have good insights into why a class worked or didn't work, insights that need to be listened to, they are not master teachers, nor has anyone ever taught them how to evaluate a classroom experience.  Because of this, they will say things that are upsetting to you without actually meaning to do so.  They will say, "This is the worst class I have every taken." They will say, "This class reminded me of high school." They will say a number of negative things, and frame it condescendingly by saying, "I know s/he is young and inexperienced, and I am sure s/he will improve."  They will describe you as an adjunct -- when you are in the third year of your tenure clock. They will comment on your appearance (increasingly, I see this showing up in student evaluations of men as well as women):  you are "eye candy;" "not hard to look at;" or "hot."  This feels even more degrading when paired with negative comments like:  "Discussion sessions were really a drag, but fortunately s/he's easy on the eyes."

Comments like this have led to an increasing number of young professors asserting that they are being "sexually harassed" by their students, which I must say, I think is beside the point.  The point is:  the student has so offended and embarrassed you (because you know this will be read by dozens of other people at your next evaluation) that whatever else the student has said that might be useful is lost to you.  At this juncture you must not:

• obsess about which student it was;
• obsess about the possible effects on your tenure case of being perceived as a cougar in training;
• dismiss the rest of the evaluation, and any others with negative comments, as entirely informed by sexism, racism, homophobia or any other form of prejudice.  Even though your view that they are inflected with prejudice is probably accurate, it doesn't mean that there may not be something you need to pay attention to.  Similarly, students who get bad grades are not entirely wrong about whether they were taught well or taught poorly, even though they may misrecognize their own role in a poor classroom experience.

Instead, consider this:

• Create a grid for yourself, in which you begin to classify comments about what worked and what didn't work that allows you to separate useful from useless comments, and put all the evaluations in a much broader context.
• See if there are criticisms that repeat, and imagine whether you can re-think some of your methods without giving up aspects of your teaching that you believe in.
• See if there are substantive compliments that repeat, and give yourself credit for what you have done well.
• Remind yourself that students do bring prejudices into the classroom that they are not entirely aware of, that they say and write thoughtless things to each other, that Internet culture has aggravated this, and that it is part of our job as adults to socialize them.

Remember that your colleagues know a lot about how to read teaching evaluations.  While students are an important source of raw data, they are experts at consuming a classroom experience -- not experts in pedagogy itself.  Your colleagues are.  Go to them.

Untenured people tend not to want to do this because they are convinced that letting people who will evaluate them know that they have not been 100% successful will be damaging to their reputations.  And yet, this fear can leave an inexperienced person in the frantic position of trying to fix something that might not be broken; or of re-inventing the wheel when a more experienced colleague could easily demonstrate how to address the problem.  Said person might also offer reassurance, a cold beer, and be favorably impressed with your desire to improve your teaching.

It's also worth saying:  you can't exactly hide your teaching evaluations.  People will read them eventually.  Although teaching evaluations do have something to do with whether you will eventually succeed at being a college professor (i.e., get tenure and be permitted to remain in the profession), the relationship is not a direct one, and your senior colleagues can help you shape yourself as a teacher.  Whether student comments please you or do not please you, it is wise to ask someone to help you interpret your first few batches of evaluations so that you can get a sense of what they mean where you are.

For example, when I began my teaching career, I taught two classes at an urban SLAC and two at a public commuter college.  I tended to begin each class by linking the day's topic to a political event that had happened that day and sparking a 5-10 minute exchange about it with the students.  When I received the SLAC evaluations, it was clear that this went over quite well, and that students thought it made the whole course more "relevant" to their interests.  In the public college setting, it didn't:  I received numerous comments in which students characterized me as lazy, wasting time, and unfocused.

Why?  The answer, I think, was quite easy, once I got over being hurt and embarrassed.  

• What I was doing was good teaching at a residential institution where students hoped and expected to build relationships with professors that would last over a period of years.  They were very political, and had come to this college to have a "relevant" education.  My strategy made them feel valued and respected, and it did help them connect to the material.
• What I was doing was bad teaching at a college where students were fully embedded in the world:  they usually had families, carried a full course load at night, and worked full-time jobs during the day.  They were sacrificing a lot for their educations and expected every minute to count.  They had come from high schools where teachers felt free to give them standardized tests about material they had never been taught.  Worse, since this was the late 1980s, when adjunctification was becoming the norm in public education, they had reasons to be suspicious of those of us who trooped in and out on our way to somewhere else.

Sharing your evaluations can help you learn a lot about teaching, and can help you acquire some empathy for why students might characterize you in ways that seem wrong.  This empathy can help you teach them better:  one outcome of talking through the evaluations I describe above was also to understand that, although they had evaluated me positively, I might have also made certain assumptions about my SLAC students that needed to be corrected.  More importantly, going public with your evals also have the effect of dispelling paranoia and shame, something we are easily prone to in situations where privacy can cause criticisms to fester without activating their potential to make us better teachers. 

"Magnificent Wind:"* In Which The Radical Begins Receiving Excuses From Her Students Even Before The Term Begins

Yesterday I, and a number of other colleagues who work at Zenith and other colleges, began to receive a steady stream of emails from students. They said some version of the following: "Hey, Professor, I am going to Barack's inauguration and won't make it back in time for class on Wednesday afternoon. I am sure you support my presence at this historic event. Hope this is ok -- let me know if it isn't, (signed) Siouxsie Q."** I had several crabby, middle-aged responses to the emails I received, including:

"Hay is for horses" (I had a kindergarten teacher back in 1964 who was fond of this one.)

"If I am not going to the inauguration because I have a prior commitment to be at school to advise you on Tuesday, and teach you on Wednesday, why shouldn't you actually have some commitment to be there and receive these services?" As the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR), a font of wisdom on matters of playground justice, would say, "So who told you life was fair, Radical?" Point taken.

"In the twenty-four hours between the end of the swearing in ceremony (which you will be watching on a Jumbotron, simply another kind of TV) and my class at 1:10 the following day, you could get back from San Francisco, London, and perhaps even Moscow; you can certainly get back to my classroom from the District of Columbia, so actually you are staying so you can party all night and not get up at the crack of dawn to put your sorry, hungover behind on public transportation." Now this is something I could have sympathy for, as opposed to the claim that affordable and timely travel arrangements are impossible.

"Oh grow up Radical" (said to self) "Who gives a crap what they do? Particularly when it offers you a topic for a blog post?"

Then I sent an email to my class telling them that I expected to see them there at 1:10 sharp on Wednesday, and I went to a lovely dinner party where we talked about what a relief it was to finally hear a (prospective) cabinet member say, in so many words that water-boarding (aka, simulated drowning) "is torture."

But I do wonder whether the Bush administration's penchant for acting like mutual obligation was a waste of time and money, for telling obvious lies as if they were true, and pretending that bad decisions represented the only possible option, has infected all of us in some indefinable way that will take time to recover from, no matter what breed of dog the Obamas eventually adopt. As a much younger colleague from another institution who was at that dinner party agreed, this kind of exchange is common between teacher and student nowadays, at least among those of us who teach at elite private colleges. "I have to go to the inauguration, which unfortunately conflicts with your class," is yet another version of, "I just found out I can't be in class tomorrow because my parents want me to come to Paris for the weekend" (I mean, whose parents really tell them on Wednesday that they expect to see them at dinner in the Marais on Friday?) Or try this one: "I need to take the exam early because my dad's travel agent bought me a non-refundable ticket to L.A. and I'm leaving the Tuesday before break." But my favorite one is this. Every once in a while students at Zenith organize a campus strike to raise consciousness about some serious issue. Inevitably, I am then asked -- well-known left-winger that I am -- whether I would please cancel my class so that my students can go on "strike" and not have to worry that they will miss anything that will affect their final grades. Some of you, dear readers, might say that there are students less interested in the political issue at hand who have actually (I know this is gross, but I am going to say it) paid for that class, and might think I have an obligation to teach it if they plan to be there. This is one good point. But a second is that the point of a student strike is to interrupt business as usual, and it doesn't work if business as usual has been, well, canceled, by lefty profs sympathetic to the cause.

All of these interactions have several common themes, in my view: powerlessness over one's own schedule; an assumption that the activity to be substituted for the academic obligation is not a preference or choice, but an unavoidable conflict with fixed parameters; and the request that permission be granted, after the fact, so that the student can feel good about the choice to do something fun that displaces the obligations attendant to being in school. "I hope this is ok" is another way of saying "what kind of unjust person would you be to kick me out of a course I need for my major just because I went to DC to party my butt off at this unique, historical moment for partying?" I agree that probably would be too steep a penalty for missing the first day of class; but it would also be fair to let you know, that I know, that for $15, you can catch one of many Fung Wah Bus departures from the District of Columbia after 3 P.M. Tuesday. Tickets are still available!

I could kick them out of class if I wanted to, but they are banking on it that a reasonable person would not do such a thing. Looking on the bright side, it is even a compliment that I am perceived as a reasonable person. But the corollary to that, in my view, is that I should not be required to endorse their failure to meet their obligations to me; or to reassure them that meeting these obligations was clearly impossible, given the odds stacked against them. This last can be tricky when, for example, we all know that there are parents who are exactly so narcissistic that they make fixed, and expensive, plans without consulting their children at all; and that, because of various divorces, joint custody arrangements and remarriages, children who are not at all wealthy are buffeted by impossible scheduling demands from an early age and might just find it easier to submit to family demands. Yet, would not some of those parents be able to hear it, and even be impressed at the sign of new maturity, if Biff responded to the notice from the travel agent by saying: "Gee Dad, I'm so sorry you are going to have to change the ticket, but this economics midterm is just too important to me to screw it up. And it isn't fair to the teacher to put her to the trouble of making up a new exam and setting up a proctor just for me. If you want me to pay the difference, I can, but next time, could you ask me?"

Part of what I would like to salvage from these encounters -- which in the end, mean little in terms of a semester's work -- is what they have to teach us about the changing climate for instruction more generally, both in elite schools like mine and at schools where students are more highly conscious of the conditions by which hard-earned cash is exchanged for knowledge and credentials. And how do we talk about these things as faculty without trashing students, and in a way that examines our own responsibility to meet students where they are? Part of what is shifting dramatically, and what we do not know how to talk about except in the crudest, most reactive terms, is the notion that a college course represents some kind of fixed, but unspoken, contract between teacher (authority) and student (subject), in which the student is bound to a particular schedule, and a social relationship, that respects the traditional power imbalance between teacher and learner, grader and gradee. It is very rare that I find myself enforcing all the terms of my syllabus nowadays; but it is also rare that more than a few of my students feel bound by the terms of the syllabus, or that any expectation, great or small, cannot be altered to accommodate their "needs," great or small. How, and why, these power relations between professors and students are shifting; what constitutes a successful negotiation about expectations between teacher and student; how electronic communication has facilitated and/or ameliorated those shifts and how we speak to each other about them; and how new expectations about power and authority play themselves out in daily, casual encounters between teachers and students -- all of these things deserve a great deal more thought as we enter this bright and shining new day.

* According to Wikipedia, "Magnificent Wind" is a loose translation of "Fung Wah." Perfect, no?

**This is an amalgam of several, surprisingly similar emails, received by me and other colleagues. The emails were so similar that I actually went to the Obama-Biden Transition Team web page to see if there was a standard excuse being made available to students skipping class to attend the inauguration.

The Radical's History Reviewed: When I Was Bad, I Was Horrid

Mostly because they have been linked by my history colleague Historiann, I have of late been drawn to the luridly enraged and cruelly hilarious posts at Rate Your Students. A blog response to the notorious RateMyProfessors.com, RYS, from my point of view, is a kind of academic pornography: it's outrageous, and it relies on cruel caricatures of students that have enough truth in them to make them universally recognizable -- the terrible students described at this blog can be found at a community college, an Ivy, or any stop in between. It doesn't stop at pillorying undergraduates, but produces the occasional post that skewers graduate students for being whining, careless little piss-ants.

You will notice that RYS is not on the list of blogs I follow regularly (see widget on the left), but in fact I do follow it regularly from a bookmarked link in my Safari navbar. While there are many blogs I follow from bookmarks, RYS is there as the internet equivalent of sliding a dirty magazine between the mattress and the box spring. I don't want to read it, but I do -- or more accurately, I don't want to want to read it. Every time I do it feels like the time a feminist colleague of mine urged me to read Jane Gallop's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Duke: 1997): "It's like a horrible traffic accident," she said; "You can't not look."

Yet RYS, compelling as it is, reminds me that one characteristic of the blogosphere is a kind of self-righteous rage that often gets focused on students, colleagues, institutional politics, varsity athletics, or "the administration" -- a rage that is more complex, surely, in its origins and context than whatever rant I am reading wants to admit to. Many of us are frustrated, insecure, overworked, under-rewarded, and uncertain about what the future will hold. We were told in graduate school that if we worked hard we would succeed, and we did work hard - so why are some of us teaching adjunct and some of us on a jet plane to a contract for a crossover narrative history of the Nixon presidency and a named chair? Why do some of us get up early and stay up late, publishing and teaching our hearts out in visiting positions, only to be told that we are "too far along" for the tenure-track assistant professor slot we would take despite our age and accomplishments to get our careers back on track? Why do some of us resolve every year to put our scholarship first, only to be loaded down with committee work, course overloads, and the excess grunt-work of the university?

Enter the clueless student who, through carelessness, narcissism, and often unconsciously rude and over-privileged behavior, becomes the fulcrum around which all of our rage and frustration about Planet College congeals. This is the student who disputes every grade below an A-, and tells you in the teaching evaluation that you have liberal bias; the student who walks in ten minutes late, misses every question you answered about the assignment that is due tomorrow, and expects you to repeat it all one-on-one in a special appointment outside office hours; the student who drinks pints of water in class, and then needs to leave abruptly in the middle of your lecture to refill the water bottle and, inevitably, go to the bathroom.

Well dear reader, I was once that student. Not always, or even most of the time, but sometimes. And like the girl with the curl, when I was bad I was horrid.

I was reminded of this because I was recently assigned the task of either disposing of several large boxes of personal papers (which we have hauled from home to home for almost twenty years) or finding a place to keep them other than the front hall of our otherwise gracious home. Clearly decisions needed to be made. Upon opening one box, I discovered an accordion file that contains what must be almost every college paper I wrote and -- I kid you not -- thirty notebooks full of lecture and seminar notes from the classes I took as an undergraduate at Oligarch University.

The courses I liked are obvious: "E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels," I scribbled on one notebook cover, after a hasty post-lecture conference with one professor. In a different color ink, there is a library call number: clearly I actually got this book out of the library and read it. Similarly, on the inside front leaf of the notebook for a course on the Third Republic, I noted advice given to me over a beer by one of my favorite professors: "Find Charles Tilly/could be critical to future." Little did I know that fate would deliver Tilly and his wonderful wife Louise into my hands (actually me into theirs, but I am the hero of this story) when they took a position at the New School in New York. They, in turn, would invite me to join a proseminar where I spent a semester developing a dissertation on American bandit crime with Eric Hobsbawm. Wheels within wheels, man. You couldn't make this up. And it all started with a professor who liked to sit down and have a drink with his students.

Then I pulled out a notebook from a political science course called "Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual," and one vivid -- but not the only -- blemish on my undergraduate past flashed before my eyes in nauseating detail. You see, we had virtually no advising at Oligarch, which means that the vast number of us chose the courses we took by a method that was governed by an entirely personal calculus. For example, my roommate and I, most semesters, signed up for a lecture course that required us to read novels: the Victorian novel, the Eighteenth Century Novel, the Modern American Novel. I was an English major, she was an Art major, but why did we sign up for these classes? Because we liked reading novels, and we liked to talk to each other about them. Duh. My other method was to sign up for courses that were either taught by people I knew to be good, or cool (a technique for making intellectual choices that my students at Zenith practice to this day), or courses that promised reading or insight on a hip topic that I knew nothing about. I also signed up for what seems now, for someone who became a twentieth century historian, an excessive number of courses in Renaissance literature, where my huge and unaccountable crush on the professor was entirely and fully satisfied by excelling at close readings of Spenser and his contemporaries week after week, and imagining how my insight and critical skills might ultimately lead to a romantic encounter with this scholar.

But until the fall of my junior year, at a certain point in every semester, I -- not very consciously -- decided which courses deserved my full attention (Spenser, for example) and which ones I could blow off. And I blew off, I'm afraid to say, more than enough courses to produce an undergraduate transcript that would raise fatal doubts about my capacity for graduate study were I to apply today.

"Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual" was one of the courses I ultimately blew off. The early pages are promising: "Can intellectualism bridge the gap between intellectuals and reality?" I mused on September 13. "Look over last year's notes on [Raymond] Aron." The following week we read Camus' The Rebel: "in the final analysis," I wrote, "being an intellectual depends on autonomy -- but is autonomy possible? Is money a practical problem?" I was so deep.

By the following week things had, imperceptibly perhaps, started to fall apart. Underneath a few sketchy ideas about the role of art and artists in a revolutionary movement (I told you I was deep), I had written to a classmate: "I heard in the dining hall that a freshman tried to kill himself in the seventh floor men's room in Sterling Stacks last night. This is unsettling." No shit, Sherlock. The following week, underneath disjointed scribbles about C. Wright Mills ("the activist intellectual," "constant need for critique," etc.), I wrote: "I've got to stay awake. This class has only ten people in it, and I'm falling asleep, about to embarrass myself. Three girls across the table are doing it too -- one was really asleep for a while." And later: "She's done it again. I'm going to sleep, and it doesn't help that the two girls next to her are yawning quite a bit. How embarrassing."

Reading this ancient notebook, I was identifying entirely with the instructor, who I have to tell you, I do not remember at all. But she was a woman, teaching at Yale when there were almost no women teaching at Yale -- I probably took courses from all of them, in fact. Dear God. What a monstrous little bastard I was. I turned the page to the following week's session.

"Proposed Camp for Deposed Dictators," I had written at the top of the page, not even bothering to note what the reading assignment was -- had I done it? "Campers: Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, Somosa, Richard Nixon. Games campers will not be allowed to play: capture the flag, Monopoly. Books campers will not be allowed to read: How To Be Your Own Best Friend, The Good Soldier, Mad Magazine, Look Back in Anger. Required Reading: You Can't Go Home Again." Once an English major, always......

Oh, what a card I was. Two weeks later, I had clearly stopped listening in any meaningful way. Sketches of beatniks, gerbils and people throwing up alternated with the New York Times crossword puzzle carefully pasted into the notebook. Looking up occasionally with a feigned frown, I hoped to appear serious, present and engaged as I did battle with Eugene T. Maleska -- in pen, thank you very much, just to prove how much confidence I had in my own brilliance, despite the fact that I was now learning nothing. Oh sure, there were occasional, feeble stabs at being engaged with the course. "For next week read How Much to Catalonia (?????)," and a page of notes labeled "preparation for oral report on Bakunin" (I gave an oral report on Bakunin?) The notebook ends in mid-December with a crude cartoon of a prisoner in a cage saying: "Help! I am trapped in this class and I almost laugh all the time it is so silly!"

Lucky for this professor that a semester must, eventually, come to an end, eh? And how lucky that this was prior to the routine use of teaching evaluations. And yet, having carefully documented all my misbehavior as if it was a rational response to her poor teaching, I don't recall the professor ever treating me with the disrespect I clearly deserved, calling me out from behind the crossword puzzle, or taking revenge of any kind. Maybe she knew she wasn't teaching well, or maybe there was more of a laconic attitude towards seminar work among Oligarch undergraduates than I recall and there was nothing she could do as we withdrew singly and as a group. Maybe the deadening, tortuous pace of this class was not something she felt she had much power over. Who knows?

Strangely, a quick look at my Oligarch transcript, also in the box, shows an A- for the course. Must have been the oral report on Bakunin.

As I say, I don't remember this professor at all, which in a way is truly horrifying -- only her last name survives on the outside of the notebook. If she remembers me, and wants to report me to RYS in an ex post facto kind of way, I think it would be fair. But I would like to close by remembering, very briefly, another class that I blew off: the first gay and lesbian studies course I ever took, taught by a famous gay poet, who we queer students all admired because he was handsome and witty and smart, was publicly involved with another famous gay poet, and appeared to be having the romantically perfect intellectual life that we all craved. Inexplicably however, or at least inexplicably to the youthful me, I did all the reading for this course but could sometimes not bring myself to actually go to class for a week or so at a time. Now, of course, it seems very clear that I was more than a little conflicted about my own sexuality, blah, blah, blah; and what that had to do with me taking the class in the first place, blah, blah, blah. But I worked very hard to compartmentalize that knowledge then because it would have interfered with my pose, which relied for its effect on a feigned indifference to the emotions and responsibilities felt by ordinary, boring people; my biting, sarcastic wit; and what I (tragically funny this) believed was my intellectual uniqueness.

At one point, when I had missed about two weeks of classes in a row, I ran into my professor on the street.

"Sorry I haven't been in class," I said in what I thought was a sophisticated and nonchalant way, "I've been very ill." This professor, to my surprise and horror, turned around and fell into step with me, thus enhancing my discomfort. He encouraged me to talk in detail about the illness that had kept me home from class, day after day, and yet left me free to roam the streets only an hour or so after the most recent meeting. Quickly regaining my composure, I drew on some details of illnesses that I was, in fact, regularly plagued by, hinted at the possibility of a walking pneumonia, trips for chest x-rays and what have you. The more I talked about it, the more convinced I was that I had pulled myself back from the brink and was, in fact, on my way home from another tiring trip to Radiology.

"Hmmm," he said, and stopped walking. "Well, let me give you a piece of advice. I don't mind if you lie to me about why you aren't coming to class. I expect it, really. But don't lie to yourself. That's a very bad habit to get into. See you next week." And then he walked away, leaving a rather stunned and humiliated me behind. I didn't miss any more classes.

I suppose there should be a moral to this story, but I don't think there is: it's probably unwise to draw morals from partly digested snippets of one's own life anyway. Speaking bluntly to students as if they were adults doesn't always work, which I know better than anyone. In fact, it almost never works, because we are often speaking about something important that only time can reveal to them. But I do wonder about the motivations of those who convert their classroom experience to raging, mean, (often hilarious, I admit) posts on Rate Your Students. Often we have no idea what is going on behind the facades erected by students who use politeness and good behavior to fend us off while they collect their average or better than average grades. But we might learn something about good teaching from the students who fail, the ones who go out of their way to flout our authority. Or at the very least, we might see their rudeness as an opportunity to teach to more than the text once in a while. And if we understand their arrogance, their bravado, their selfishness, their narcissism and their cluelessness as critique or resistance, we might even gain some insight as to what we have at stake in our role as classroom authorities in the first place.