Teaching and Reflection

It's 11:00 pm and I just read my teaching evaluations for the semester. I'm trying to digest them. Every time I get the email "your teaching evaluations are ready to be viewed", a lump comes into my throat. I wonder if that will ever change. In the more than 6 semesters I've been at JMU (and way more than that if you count summer and the courses I taught while a doc student), I still get the lump every time.

I get the lump for a couple of reasons. First of all, because I want my students to know that I did my best to teach them. That they learned something they didn't know before. I'm not perfect, no one is. Second of all, because my job depends on it.

I've been on the assessment committee in the College of Education for the last three years, during which we've worked on ways to get more meaningful feedback from our students. We're all concerned with it being accurate, reflective data that we can use. So, do the numbers matter? Yes, they do. They matter in tenure and promotion. But to me, the comments matter more (by the way those also matter in tenure and promotion).

I'm not so concerned with whether students "like me" or not (although, of course it feels good to be liked!). I do want my classroom to have a climate conducive to learning, but I'm not out for popularity; I do this job because I want to produce the best teachers. I'm much more concerned with whether or not what I gave them was valuable. Sometimes they don't know if it was valuable until they are out in the real world teaching. But oh, their words can be elevating and hurtful, especially if you truly did do the best you could.

If I'm going to model being a reflective teacher, then I have to respond to their comments and scores, thinking carefully and honestly about how to get better each time I approach a course. This semester's scores weren't bad, but I had some personal ups and downs (e.g., pneumonia, etc) that held me back from being full steam ahead. I have a lot more responsibility than I ever had in the first two years, and to be honest and vulnerable, it's sometimes hard to manage it all. 100+ emails a day. 75+ phone calls and messages a day. Going through the process of adoption. This semester I had over 70 students total across three courses. I do believe I did my best, because I always try to do my best. But as my mom once told me, doing "your best" doesn't always mean "the best". For a perfectionist like me, that's a hard pill to swallow.

Sometimes I try to use humor to soften a callous. Sometimes students write really funny things on evaluations like "he wears too many sweater vests" or "I'd like to have him over for beef stew" or "she is the devil's right hand man" or "she ran a rein of terror over the class" (these are REAL examples, people, not of comments on mine, but of others I know). So I found this funny article about teaching evaluations on the chronicle. You must understand that it's totally tongue and cheek before you read it, but it's a pretty eye opening discussion starter to how we evaluate college professors.

I'm too tired to think about it anymore right now. In a few weeks (when my wounds have healed a little), I'll look at them again with a more objective eye. Here's the link if you want an interesting read.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Torment-of-Teaching-Eva/45129