Teaching Evaluations

The single biggest thing I stress about each semester is my teaching evaluations. This might seem absurd. But still being a young teacher and knowing what they might mean on the market, particularly at community colleges or small, liberal-arts schools where I am more likely to get a job, the teaching evaluations are really important. Plus, to some extent, I take them as a sign of validation. If I've done a good job, I'll probably get good evaluations. If I have done a bad job, I won't.

The problem with taking these so personally is that the evaluation system is deeply flawed. If you are hard or assign a lot of work, you are far less likely to get good evaluations than if you are a push-over or if you don't want to deal with grading so you don't assign very much work. I can't do this. It really bothers me that so many faculty members see teaching as the last thing on their plate and so they don't put the energy into it that they should. So you get upper-division classes with very little reading assigned, pointless assignments that are both easy and uninspiring, and preferring to give high grades so you don't have to deal with student complaints. These are signs of serious problems within the academy. This has become worse with the rise of the student-as-consumer idea, which in short claims that students are shopping for the best deal, that faculty are commodities that are "purchased" by students, and that faculty should serve students. This puts a lot of pressure on faculty to mold their courses to serve student interests rather than to mold students' minds. All of this is made worse by websites such as ratemyprofessor.com, where students basically rank professors by how easy (or hot) they are and which encourages the publicizing of easy teachers.

I have really worked to reject the path of modern teaching during my first years as a college teacher. I do assign a lot of work. I expect a lot. I try to challenge my students. I'm not the best teacher. Not by a long shot. But I do try. I have become better over time. The first semester I taught my ratings were pretty low. There were good reasons for that. The class didn't really cover a strength of mine. I lectured too much. I included too much information. I didn't have enough class participation. But I learned and have fixed these problems (more or less) without making my classes easier. I still get comments saying that the class is too hard, that there is too much reading, etc. But to me, these comments are not really legitimate complaints. After all, isn't that what you're here for? However, each semester the evaluations have become stronger. And I was very happy this week to find out that my spring courses resulted in my highest evaluations yet, with my first upper-division course that I designed resulting in quite high marks.

And while I know I shouldn't take these evaluations as validation, I do anyway. So I am in a good mood this week.