on reading teaching evaluations

Music: Jackson Browne: Saturate Before Using (1972)

Every time I see course evaluation folders in my mailbox, I am reminded of a specific episode of Seinfeld: Jerry is dating Jodi, a masseuse, who refuses to give him a massage. The dramatic tension is caused, however, by Jodi's profound dislike of George, which drives George crazy. George becomes obsessed with getting Jodi to like him for the remainder of the episode (hilarity ensues; a clip of the episode is here). I've always loved this episode because I can identify with George---I suspect many of us can. You can meet a sea of people at a party, but it's just that one person who makes it known he or she doesn't care for you that will bother you for the remainder of the evening. I call this "George Costanza Syndrome" (GCS), and I think it plagues many of us who teach---especially new teachers.

I vividly remember getting my teaching evaluations after having taught for the first time as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I had planned the class so carefully and prepared so thoroughly that surely my evaluations would be stellar. Nope. They were not terrible, of course, but not what I had expected either. The next semester I worked harder and received an evaluation that literally made me cry: it was so cruel and nasty I simply wasn't prepared for it. The student was a transfer, and resentful that she had to take public speaking a second time. Although her vitriol really was about the university's requirements, she did take it out on me and in a way that was very personal. Eventually, with the good counseling of older, more experienced grads I got over it by framing the evaluation and hanging it in the office. It became the benchmark of a "bad evaluation." I still have it in my office today, thirteen years later.

So, how do I deal with bad evaluations today? I confess not much differently. It never fails to hurt when a student writes your class "essentially failed," they "regret taking this class" or that you have "no compassion for students" (comments from last semester). And at some level a little hurt probably helps me be a better teacher, by keeping me sensitive to the needs (and increasing demands) of students. There's always the possibility I've taught a bad class too---and I know that's happened at least twice, and often because of personal issues outside of the classroom (e.g., a bad break-up).

Intellectually, however, I try to remember two things. First, the ratio: I received six bad evaluations out of eighty-five. That's about seven percent of the class, and in my view, if only 10% of your course is pissed off, you're doing an ok job.

Second, projection: While nasty course reviews feel personal, they're usually more figural in the sense that as a teacher, you are a stand-in for a figure of authority. As a stand-in, you often become a person who is projected upon; you come to personify a figure for students---and expectations for that figuration are going to differ from one student to the next. Now, Laplanche and Pontalis define projection this way:

[An] operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, or even objects, which the subject refuse to recognize or rejects himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing. Projection so understood is a defence of very primitive origin which may be seen at work especially in paranoia, but also in 'normal' modes of thought such as superstition.

With what I've been learning about cognition, I would take projection even further: it's not just the attribution of my inner-most onto another person, but rather, all meaning is projective in the sense that we must impose "order"---a la Kant---onto the world to make sense of it. In this respect, all of us are the projections of other people. This explains how so many of us are liked by some but disliked by others; each "other" has a different projection of who "I" am. In fact, we often fall I love with the person whose projection matches our ideal self-conceptions, right?

I'm veering into a tangent, so, back to the main: one can read unpleasant course evaluations as the product of projection. Let me take the worst one from this semester as an example. The student remarks "the material was so boring" and that I was rude to him/her from not letting him/her take a quiz late. On the evaluation almost every item on the inventory, from course organization and objectives to "the structure gave adequate instructions concerning assignments" has received a negative score. For 94% of the evaluations, however, the highest marks were for course organization and stated objectives. Clearly this student went for the blanket nasty review despite the fact the course was overly organized, if I do say so myself. It's a wholesale rejection because regardless of my teaching or the class, I have become the Bad Professor and there was little I could have done to change this projection.

By the way, Klein's conception of "projective identification" is also relevant here. For Klein, projective identification is when someone sends out so many cues about how they are projecting that you unwittingly change your behavior to conform. So, let's say you ticked-off a student because s/he was late to class and you would not allow him or her to take a quiz (which is my actual policy). This student believes you are uncaring and cold, and comes to your office ready for a fight. Projective identification would occur if you actually participated in the struggle (in this case, over power and not the quiz any more)---if you gave into the role you are expected to occupy. I've learned to avoid this kind of situation: you cannot get testy with a student, as this will have the ultimate effect of closing her off to learning and turning you into the Bad Professor.

So, there's the coping device: intellectualize to avoid GCS. Thinking about ratios and trying not to take nasty reviews personally via an understanding of projection helps. And, of course, there's always the route of improving one's teaching!

Even with these three things in mind, it still can bum me out to receive a bad review, especially for graduate seminars. I received a bad one for my graduate seminar last semester, which is what prompted this post. It is actually my first one in eight years of teaching graduate courses. That surprised me. But I must remember not to do like George: there is the ratio, and then, there is the projection . . . . ratio, projection, ratio, projection. Rinse. Repeat.