An Early Thirsty on "Batty" Evaluations.

Is there a Monday Thirsty? How about an Afternoon Gulp?

Ah, student evaluations. They are enclosed in a manila envelope,
small enough to fit in my briefcase and lighter than BallisticOther's shrimpy kitten, yet they perch on the edge of my desk and fester and gradually morph into the mammoth in the room. I both dread and anticipate them with not a little curiosity, because the originality and spunk with which they accuse me of any and all psychological crimes against nature are the two qualities missing from their papers all semester long.

I ask you, is there such a thing as selective application of critical thinking? Or have I succeeded in my endeavours at long last and the only outlet for the students' newfound skills is the evaluation? Perhaps I should hand out MadLibs first, but that would only result in claims that the Professor bibbles cucumbers. Try explaining that to the department chair.

Today, armed with hot chocolate and a gardenia flower BallisticOther insisted on sticking in my fedora (I am imitating Indiana Jones, if he was a teaching assistant professor, balding, and was pleasantly plump instead of abs-tastic and dashing), I finally reached over and opened that envelope. And, among other, less fun scribblings, here is what I found:

Who looks like a pineapple and makes me go to sleep?
BallisticNoter, PhD!
Boring and Weird and Dauntless is he [I don't think s/he quite got what 'dauntless' means in Lochinvar]
BallisticNoter, PhD!

I'll take it as a compliment; look, they notice my doctorate! And I'm dauntless! No, seriously, what am I supposed to do with this? So, here's the thirsty:

Q: What is the weirdest, craziest, 

downright batty evaluation you ever got?

If You Are Not a Correspondent, But Have Some Misery to Share...

...you can email it to the RGM (real goddamned moderator).

Lament's Terms

At this point in the academic year, I am usually physically and emotionally exhausted. This is also the point in the year at which the most outlandish attacks on my sanity and patience seem vested upon me.

Young, fresh-faced colleagues (YFFCs) propel themselves into my office, bearing stories from “the front”—that is, an arduous series of committee meetings initiated by the administration created in order to find logical solutions to university problems. These YFFCs are too naive to have yet realized that their endless research and efforts will be for naught, because 99% of committees created by administrators to solve university problems are only initiated so that the administration can appear to be “proactive”.

When the initial solution, which costs money, is rejected, the administration will ask those same YFFCs to “reconfigure another solution” over the summer, off contract. The administration will want the solution to cost nothing, yet solve everything. And the YFFCs will be shocked, shocked, at this turn of events. Just shocked. But they will learn. They will learn.


Congratulations, YFFC. You are now a line on an administrator’s cv, having served on the Committee to Effect Changes that the Vice President Thinks are Vitally Important but Will Eventually Refuse to Fund.

plural, just in case

Worse than the YFFCs are the students. The students that want to pass my classes, but don’t want to work. Or want me to pass them despite the fact that they haven’t worked. They want to know what is going to be on the final. They want to know why they received zeroes on their rough drafts. They want to know this despite the approximately 1,754 announcements and missives I have sent them clearly explaining the answers to such questions (if you don’t turn in your rough draft on time, you get a zero. And I’m not telling you what’s on the final.) They want to know what their course average is when there are four grades, all worth 25% of their final grade.

One student stands sullenly in my office, trying to defend his thesis statement that we ought to be able to euthanize people if they don’t seem to be enjoying their lives. I try to explain delicately that if this were the case I ought to be able to euthanize him, but he still doesn’t get it. He might if I actually attempted to euthanize him, but then I ask myself "What would Jesus do?" And I decide that Jesus would take a Xanax, and I do that instead.

Another student turns in a paper using a PowerPoint presentation created by seventh-graders as a scholarly source. She also refuses to use quotation marks to indicate direct quotes, and consistently repeats “in lament’s terms” instead of “layman’s terms,” which I find so appropriate that I the mistake stand.

In the worst case of all, a student does a happy dance of sheer joy at finding out she earned a perfect score on her final, after which she does a crying shamble of abject sorrow at finding out that she’s getting an F in the course for plagiarizing her final paper.

Lament’s terms, indeed.