I Teach

Last week, before I handed back their first grades, I had my students fill out mini-mid-term evaluations. I left the room and told them to keep their comment anonymous. It was just a simple one sheet form to ask what was working for them, what wasn't, what they liked, and what they didn't. It took me 24 hours before I could even bear to look at them. When I told my father that I was considering not looking at them at all he said "well you're not the kind of person to do that." Which indicated to me that I hadn't really been communicating with him very well about this experience at all. The idea of not looking at them was really attractive because I am really insecure about this whole teaching thing. I have training, sure, but very little actual experience. As it turns out, the evaluations were almost all positive, and even the negative comments were quickly followed by a positive note, which means, at the very least, that the students still think of me as a person with feelings. This is good, because I know that when students don't like a teacher, comments can get ugly and depersonalized very quickly in an anonymous setting. However, I'm still a little disturbed about my feelings toward these evals. I mean, I don't even want to think about what would have happened if they would have been bad (and I will get bad evaluations at some point). The amount of weight they carry (good or bad) is simply too much. I need to find a way to keep the students as the central, important feature in my teaching and yet be able to distance myself from their comments so that my self worth doesn't get tied up in a few sentences scribbled down in 5 minutes by a 19 year old who is really just looking to get out of class a few minutes early and beat the lunch rush. But I don't know exactly how this happens, maybe only through intentionality and the passage of time. Maybe it never happens.
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