All of my teaching jobs have had one common element: My performance was gauged through student evaluations. That is the great ritual of the last day of class, which ends early so that after the instructor delivers some awkward, heartfelt speech about the meaning of the semester, the evaluation forms can be handed around. Then, before the teacher leaves the room, a student is delegated to carry the forms to the appropriate office, a job for which it’s always difficult to recruit. Perhaps the students’ reticence stems from kindness, from the desire not to have any association with a teacher’s going down in flames. Or perhaps they feel that a degree of brownnosing is implied by volunteering. When a hand finally goes up, it usually belongs to one of the “good” students, someone whose brownnoser status has been so firmly established that he or she probably figures there’s nothing left to lose.
In my experience, students who don’t like me never volunteer to collect the forms.
Good/bad, like/don’t like: It’s hard not to dichotomize students in that way. And the binary system I’ve constructed probably causes me to spend way too much time thinking about the place I hold in my students’ affections. The other day, when I asked them directly about these matters, about half of them said yes, they did let the degree to which they liked the teacher guide their evaluations of him or her. The other half felt that they were capable of separating a teacher’s performance from his or her likability. (They all were suspicious about why I was asking them these questions; my explanation that I was writing something seemed dubious.)
I remember a few years ago, in her evaluation of a class I’d taught that had not gone well, a student wrote that she’d liked me very much but nonetheless had not found me a good teacher. She put it just that baldly. Her assessment puzzled me, because she’d spent countless hours in my office, pouring out her heart. Today I would go back and reread what she wrote, to check on her reasons for finding me inept, but I remember smuggling that particular batch of evaluations into the trash.
My guess is that most people find it difficult to read about themselves, especially when the purpose of the narrative is to deliver an assessment -- I know I would find it easier to be graded, as my students are, than to read their opinions of me spelled out in words. Where I teach, professors can choose from among a number of different types of evaluation forms, but we English teachers are fond of having students write essay-type evaluations. My choosing that option stems, I know, from my vindictive streak: I want the evaluation to betray something about the student’s own performance. A thoughtless or poorly written evaluation would somehow exonerate me, were I to come off in an unfavorable light. Besides, I want to make the evaluation process harder work than simply darkening ovals on a Scantron form. I want this work to weed out the lazy among my students, to give myself a competitive edge. With any luck, those who would evaluate me poorly will leave the room without turning in the essay.
These are, of course, immature thoughts, as the evaluation process reduces us to our immature selves. Peter Elbow, whose books on the writing process are widely acclaimed, has written thoughtfully about how the evaluation process could be improved. One of his ideas is to have colleagues (he calls them “buddies”) conduct peer evaluations, through classroom visits. Elbow’s program -- developed in the 1970’s at Evergreen State College, in Washington State -- was supported by grant money, enabling the buddies to receive a reduction in teaching load in exchange for their participation.
It seems to me that without the carrot of a load reduction, teachers might resent peer evaluation for adding to their many burdens; having students do the evaluating is a lot easier. (In fact, when I questioned my students about the evaluation process, their chief complaint was with the essay format, which they said was too much work. Most of them were big fans of Scantron forms.)
The work involved makes a colleague’s visit humbling to ask for; I feel guilty about making yet another demand on their time. And when I’ve had other professors come into my classroom, their presence has felt slightly traumatic, because of the strangeness -- at least for those of us who are accustomed to teaching solo -- of having another authoritarian presence in the room.
Reading Elbow’s essays on the subject recently, I got the impression that his evaluation project was a freewheeling and unthreatening affair, which resulted in more conversation than evaluation. (He calls the documents that resulted from classroom visits “letters” or “movies from the observer’s mind.”) His experiment also seems particularly in keeping with its locale. Even now, 30 years after most of the educational counterculture has evanesced, students at Evergreen do not receive conventional letter grades. I admit: When I took a summer course there a decade ago, I expected muzzy thinking to waft like patchouli across the classroom. But the absence of grades did not destabilize the class in any way that I could detect, and I was awed by the instructor’s grace and competence.
Still, at the end of the term, when I received a written overview of my performance, I found that its being positive didn’t much dim the shame I felt at having to read another person’s assessment of me. Those same shameful feelings have led me to stop reading my students’ evaluations of my teaching. The logistics of my schedule (I teach late in the day, and the woman who processes the evaluations works an early shift) mean that I’d have to look at the evaluations before I met my classes. I’ve discovered that this makes me too unhinged to teach.
Not reading evaluations would seem like a terrible lapse on my part, and yet I am not sure that what I’m missing would do me much good. When I started teaching and was very diligent in matters of self-assessment, I used to survey my classes at midsemester so that I could incorporate the students’ suggestions. However, my courses often fell apart in the second half of the semester. When I asked the students about this, they told me that everything had been fine until I changed what I was doing and began doing what they wanted me to do. “You’re supposed to be the expert,” they said. They felt that my asking for their direction and then being stupid enough to actually take it exposed my leadership as a fraud.
Often I have to remember that teaching is a process by which information is conveyed and/or skills are imparted; whether I am likable or not would seem to be of little consequence. More important, I tell myself, is clarity of expression and the breadth of an instructor’s knowledge. But when I think back on my own college experience -- or experiences: one in English, one in science -- what I remember is neither of those properties. If what lingers is the true test of what has been learned, then I would conclude that the most important quality in a teacher is a vivid personality. I remember the flamboyant clothing and quirky affectations of my teachers long after I have forgotten the plot lines and theorems.
I know, though, that I am the kind of person who likes to move through life as unobtrusively as possible. And I well remember another comment from an evaluation some years back that still hurts, when a student wrote that he hadn’t paid attention to me because he hadn’t realized that I was anybody. I should have more boldly paraded my publications, he said. He thought I had presented myself too blandly to be a person of any consequence.
Teaching -- particularly when our performance is being evaluated -- makes us acutely aware of the objective selves we present to the world. I have never been comfortable with the idea of having an objective self, to the point that I rarely look in mirrors, and never in full-length ones. As a subjective being, I can barely hold my ground as the world spins past. I don’t even want to consider the objective me, the one whom the world sees, with all her flaws, if she even exists. If I remember correctly, it was Schopenhauer who wrestled with the same dilemma, before concluding that it was immature and insoluble, and that one should just grow up enough to move on.
Yet, inescapably, life constantly evaluates us: We’re served with divorce papers, we learn our cholesterol level, we get turned down for tenure. Or we get promoted, our poem gets published, we win in the over-40 age division in our local 10K race. We have to carry those moments with us, too, however difficult that may be. Too often, the good in life seems temporary, while the bad stuff goes on and on. So it is with teaching evaluations. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many wonderful things that students have said about me over the years, but the zingers stick to me like burrs.
Lucia Perillo is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Last month she was awarded a fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: A48
