Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are returned to most faculty within six weeks of the end of the previous term. In a quarter system, that means SETs come rolling into my not-so-eager hands during mid-January, mid-April, and mid-July of each year. A golden rule of surviving to the next term is to never (and I mean never) read SETs during an active season of teaching. Such a behavior is prone to tipping the scales, one way or another, to a point where humble teaching with a pure spirit becomes an impossibility.
That leaves the off-season for reading and perusing SETs. Another of my golden rules of teaching is to begin the process of reading SETs, however thorough or superficial such a reading may ultimately be, with a glass of wine nearby. To protect against the toxicity of these things, I also keep the rest of the bottle nearby, within arm's reach in case an emergency arises. As I open the envelope, a feeling of dread coursing through my veins at an ever-increasing pace, I will read the "numbers" sheet first, where the efforts of my heart are reduced to a single sheet of cold, clear, and impeccably accurate numbers.
If the numbers are great, I will feel elated for a few brief and memorable moments. But, then the feelings of being an imposter will quickly roll in, smothering the elation with feathers of shame. I will know that this time, I was simply a fake. This time, I have cleverly tricked students into liking my teaching, when the reality is that I am only fooling them. The roller coaster of up, down, and in between numbers in terms gone by proves the true nature of my teaching. While I may get lucky sometimes, no truly good teacher has such a large standard deviation as mine in her statistics profile of SETs. As I peruse the great numbers, I will swallow the glass of wine and reach for another before cautiously proceeding to the yellow pages that follow. The yellow pages are those with handwritten comments from each student regarding the details of the good, bad, and the ugly in my teaching. I won't get any further work done that evening.
If the numbers are good but not great, I will first feel relieved. I will neither feel a fake nor will I feel a failure. I will feel delightfully ordinary. Then, I will remember that when my colleagues of higher professorial rank and other promotion & tenure folks review these evaluations, nothing but the best numbers will go without comment. As I remember this reality, the dread will creep back onto my radar, but it will do so slowly, with no accompanying rush of adrenaline. This form of dread and deflation is manageable. I will swallow the glass of wine and not reach for another. I'll go on to the yellow sheets with the glass in my hand. I may even get further work done that evening. My husband may even see me smile again during such an evening. If the numbers are good, life is almost good.
If the numbers are horrible, the tears will immediately creep into my eyes before I can control my emotions. If I'm lucky, I will have already been "invited" into the associate dean's office to discuss these evaluations. The associate dean means no harm; she only wants to protect me from fall-out from the horrible numbers. But, the shame starts anyway at the time she meets with me and by the time I open the evaluations, I have had time to adjust to the trauma of it all. If I am unlucky, though, and no one calls me on the horrible evaluations before I open them, I will cry for quite a while before I move onto the yellow sheets. I will want to quit teaching. I will finish the glass of wine and move on to at least one other. I won't get any other work done that evening.
Regardless of their magnitude, after I am done scanning and absorbing the numbers, over-rated statistics that they may be, I will move on to the yellow pages in the SET package. These contain handwritten student comments, those that detail the experience as perceived and reported by the students (in all objectivity, of course). As I flip through the yellow pages, I will filter out the bayonets, the knives, and the geese… from the rest.
The bayonets are the comments that can shatter my morale and vaporize my motivation for an undetermined amount of time into the future. One question on the yellow sheets asks students to hypothesize what could be done to improve future offerings of the course. Responses like "Remove this professor from the university" qualify as bayonets. These are the comments that tempt me to crawl under a rock for twenty odd years or more.
The knives are the comments that are not only off topic but unnecessarily personal and simultaneously, do no one any good in future teaching effort (e.g. "She's not funny" -- What does my success at humor have to do with learning?). I will try to discard the knives without further ado, but their residue lingers. They wound for no good reason.
The geese (and wild ones at that) are the comments that tempt me to change the course or the teaching in the next offering (e.g. "More homework problems would be helpful."). From past experience, however, I know that if I add more homework problems, the next round of yellow sheets will offer something like "Too many homework problems". Chasing wild geese like this can lead to an inordinate waste of preparation and pose an immense distraction from the real work of teaching. Tempting as it is, I drop these wild geese into the 'maybe, but probably not' bucket and move on. The geese frustrate for no good reason and I will frequently doubt these dispensations to the maybe bucket.
The rest of the comments are a combination of reasonable suggestions I should follow, suggestions I don't understand, and suggestions that bear no further classification. From these, I simply try to find the one or two remaining useful nuggets that can improve the next offering of the course, my teaching, or both.
At this point, having sorted through the yellow sheets, it really doesn't matter what the numbers said. Most of the bottle of wine is now gone.
Such is what it takes to survive SETs, even when read during the off season.
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