student evaluations

So today I finally got a glimpse at my student evaluations from last semester. The first-year writing ones were for the most part (and as expected) horrible, but the comments I got from my upper-level lit courses were a delightful surprise.

I loved my early English lit. survey last semester-- I'd never felt so excited about a class, and I felt I did a better job teaching than I ever had before. And while in some of the comments, students complained about the quizzes or my "unrealistic" expectations, I also had comments like these, the first of which I'm hanging on the wall next to my desk.

• "Dr. Z is a tough professor. She doesn't indulge in any uneducated whining and when we haven't read the material, she notices and marks us off for it. I probably learned more in this class about thinking critically than I have in three years of taking similarly structured survey courses. For this reason, Dr. Z is amazing. She sometimes says unintentionally hilarious things that I write in the margins of my lit. notebooks. I have a long-established and pronounced disdain for the subject matter of this class, and it may have been my favorite all term. (!) Dr. Z is creative, brilliant and difficult to please. It was a wonderful challenge."
• "Dr. Z is a complete joy. She is very knowledgeable and entertaining."

There were a lot of other nice ones, too. My confidence is up, a lot, today, and I'm feeling not-so-nervous about addressing the not-reading problem in today's class. I can be tough, raise the bar, and force them to meet it, while still keeping a positive attitude and a sense of humor about it. I think I can turn this around.

Looking back (it's now later, after class), it feels a bit strange to read some of these comments... some of them, like the last one above, seem very Roger Ebert-y (ebertesque?): " A complete joy!" "Knowledgeable and entertaining!" "Creative, brilliant and difficult to please!" I'm not sure how I feel about that-- even when the comments are affirming instead of soul-shattering. More on this in weeks & months to come.