The feeling at my private university is "Serve the students." 50% of my upcoming (4 more years) T&P is teaching, and since we don't have any collegial visits, it's just the student evals.
I had a bad set in the fall, and I've been gunshy ever since. "Grades too hard." "This isn't a grad class." "She thinks she's smarter than us."
So I've tried to dumb the classes down this semester and it worked for a while, but when the midterm grades came out, they were lousy. Students still weren't getting it. They don't read. They write like apes. They dodge class, want extensions. They want extra credit and are alarmed when they don't get it.
I sat down with my mentor 2 weeks ago and laid out my worries. "Don't be fearful," she said. "Let their complaints roll off your back."
"What about my student evals?" I said.
"Popularity contest."
"Well, I want to be popular, because when I'm not I get shitty scores."
"Well," my mentor said. "That is a problem. Do you ever take them cookies? Donuts? You know, have a little party?"
"A party?"
"Sure," my mentor said. "That sort of thing goes a long way. I do it. I think everyone does it."
"Like homemade cookies?"
"Sure, or brownies. They love brownies."
I like my job, the security, the paycheck. I like living where I do. I like the career. I even like teaching the 30% of the students who want to work.
But the fear I have about disappointing the rest - and the fear that their student evaluations will cost me my progress - is starting to cripple me.
What you describe here is nearly identical, line for line, with a scene described in "Generation X Goes to College," by Peter Sachs. Your department Chair is a jagoff for not having peer reviews of teaching, and for assigning so much credibility and importance to student evaluations. This can be extremely demoralizing for young faculty, because it induces of feeling that the inmates have been allowed to take over the asylum, because they very well have. I suppose your Chair isn't as bad as two that I had, though, since you don't mention being yelled at repeatedly.
ReplyDeleteYour mentor is only slightly better. Yet, your mentor is right: CM/RYS posts (I forget when) have discussed how handing out sugary snacks immediately before student evaluations can have a salutary effect on them.
In "Generation X Goes to College," Peter Sachs described being told to bring in doughnuts. He refused, but he did handle the situation by becoming "a teaching Teddy bear," by dumbing down standards and accepting any excuse, no matter how egregious. He got tenure.
I refused to hand out food, or dumb down standards, or accept stupid excuses or obvious lies, and continued to teach real, rigorous college classes as real, rigorous college classes. I got tenure, but I very nearly did not. I was only saved by my ability to involve students in research, and to bring in external funding from my NASA grants for my work with Hubble Space Telescope.
After tenure, both Peter Sachs and I tightened up standards. As Peter Sachs notes, "corrupt" is not too strong a word to describe an educational system that has come to this. I wish you the best of luck: you have a difficult job ahead.
How nice that your university likes to "serve the students." Well-done in a wine sauce is a good way to do this: anything to kill that infernal beery flavor.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you are by no means the first junior faculty member to feel fear, when you come to understand the tricky dynamic of the modern college classroom. Be careful not to show your fear. Students are like wolves: they can sense fear, and when they do, they mass for attack. They are also like sharks: one drop of blood in the water, and they can go into a feeding frenzy. They are also like vultures: they have no table manners whatsoever, and defile everything they touch, like harpies. They are unlike vultures in that they have no patience whatsoever.
YESS....Astronomer's RAGE!
DeleteSomeone mentioned gender disparity re: expectation of home-baked goods. (Incidentally, if bringing treats is part of the institutional culture, and sounds as if it may be where you are, any grocery store will sell stuff that LOOKS home-baked. Just put the brownies on a plate from the coffee room and distress them a little. And read the hilarious first chapter of "I Don't Know How She Does It" for instructions on how to distress storebought goods so they look home-made.)
DeleteThere is another point of gender disparity that your college is being professionally negligent in not addressing: disparity in student evaluations of instructors. Students routinely give female instructors lower teaching evaluations. Go here for an extensive bibliography of studies on this subject. . Institutions that ignore this, and rely solely on student evaluations of teaching for their assessment of teaching are at best doing their female instructors a disservice and at worst are running the risk of a gender discrimination lawsuit. (Though with the Supreme Court you've got now it's only a matter before gender discrimination becomes not only legal, but mandatory.) It is obscene that 50% of your tenure decision should be based on an instrument that, in that way as in so many others, is so flawed.
If you have a union (hah?) or a faculty association I would bring this up with them. The solution is to have peer reviews of your classes by other faculty members as well as student evaluations in your teaching portfolio. And, of course, to have a kick-ass teaching portfolio, come the time, in which you lay out your teaching philosophy and why you taught it this way and the expected learning outcomes and and and, all the jargon you can find, to show that you do know what you're doing (whether or not you think you do) and that every teaching decision you've made has been very carefully thought out.
Even if you do have a union or faculty association or the administration is sympathetic to the request for peer evaluations to be part of your portfolio, this will take time to set up, and likely you'll have tenure before or not much after the system changes. So for your particular case I suggest the kick-ass teaching portfolio, regular meetings with your mentor and your chair (that is, once per term) about teaching techniques etc, which you will document in your teaching portfolio, and occasional brownies for the class. NOT right before evaluations: any made-up celebration you can find. Just before Thanksgiving. End of term. The day their papers are due. Twice a term, and unpredictably. This creates a good impression that you actually care about them.
Oh, one last thing: I have found that telling my students why I'm doing it a particular way - teaching this particular text; assessing on the following grounds; assigning this particular assignment - goes a long way for very many of them. Tell them what you want them to learn in this class and how the texts and assignments will help them do that, and how the assessment techniques help you see exactly where they're getting it and where they need help. They will actually buy into this. 30% of them are quite conscious that they're there to learn and work. But as much as another 40% will actually be willing to participate in their own educations if it's spelled out for them.
And since you'll already have thought all that through for your teaching portfolio, it's not hard to just keep reminding them of why they're doing this, or doing it this way, as you go through the term.
If teaching is 50% and teaching is only evaluated based on student evals, then the system is wrong already. Student evals should only be part of a portfolio, a portfolio that includes peer observations, outcomes-based assessment rather than customer-service assessment, etc. Any decent chair needs to know how to read student evals with an appropriately jaundiced eye. I know what it means when my own evals, or those of my faculty, complain it was too hard. In my opinion, if those complaints are *absent* then I assume the prof isn't doing it right.
ReplyDeleteIt's OK to do treats, but avoid getting into bribery competition with colleagues. That only increases the level of "service" the students expect. But there's no moral crime in saying: yay, end of semester, let's have a cookie and recognize the occasion. If that produces happier evals, swell, but just do it for fun if you do it.
The moral crime would be dumbing it down, because here's the thing: no matter how dumb you make it, they'll want it dumber. So do right. Teach to the standards of your discipline. The good students will eventually write appreciative and substantive evals praising the fact that they actually learned a lot from you, and those are the ones a decent chair likes to see right next to the ones that say the course was hard.
You could just invoke Hillary Clinton and say that if you'd wanted to stay home and bake cookies, you wouldn't have gotten a Ph.D.
ReplyDeleteI'd be curious if the pressure to bring treats is equally distributed between male and female instructors.
Lastly, I overhead several of my students slamming a teacher they did not like for bringing them pizza and coke on evaluation day. They thought it was unprofessional pandering. "It didn't make her a better teacher," one said.
Good point re: potential gender disparity.
DeletePizza does strike me as somewhat over the top for some reason. Maybe because it can be viewed as a "meal" rather than a "snack."
Sometimes, though, the students do for themselves in the junk food arena. As a TA, years ago, I had a student ask if he could bring donuts to class to celebrate his birthday. Picked my class because it was his favorite, he said. But that, of course, was an exceptional group - and I was happy to oblige.
It's been my experience that students usually see through this kind of bribery pretty easily. If a student feels the semester was miserable, are you really going to buy him off with a slice of Dominio's on the last day? No, he's going to slam you on the evaluation as he scarfs down the pizza you just bought him. The pizza will probably just make the experience of ripping you a new one all the more enjoyable.
DeleteYes, I had a Poly-Sci Proffy show up with sweets on evaul day. We thought he was pandering to us: yes, he knew his subject, but other than that, he was a total bastard.
DeleteWhy read them?
ReplyDelete...I have 175 students. That's a whole lot of donuts! :)
DeleteI've been known to bring in a bag of leftover Halloween candy on November 1, but that's about it. (I can't eat it and my wife just wants it out of the house!)
ReplyDeleteFWIW, when I did adult training during my last career it was common to bring in bagels, some fruit, water, etc. But these were classes during a business day for professionals and the classes lasted anywhere from a single day to a week and usually took all day. Besides, we were budgeted for it. Providing munchies didn't seem to affect my evals, but it was a good measure of how the class discussions would go. The sullen, silent, we-don't-want-to-be-here classes usually ignored the snacks, while the enthused classes that would participate usually hit the snacks like starved grad students.
mA&M brings up a good point. Bringing treats isn't the worst thing in the world. Bosses do it to make meetings more bearable and raise moral. You can do it for the same reasons. Making students happy so they are your BFF is a disgusting display of narcissism. Bringing cookies to help you keep your job is disgusting too, but it's a reflection on your school's system, not you. I would rather buy candy for students than lower the standards.
ReplyDeleteI love that the student evaluation comment is "She thinks she's smarter than us," rather than "She can't talk to us at our level." As if the students think that the professor somehow ISN'T smarter than some undergrads!
ReplyDeleteAlso, it boggles my mind that teaching is 50% of your T&P, but you have no peer evaluation. What is wrong with this school?
I am not above bringing baked goods to class on occasion, particularly on evaluation day. But I love baking and do it often. And by the end of the semester, a work-party--when we eat, students share their research projects and we reflect on the class. It seems like a natural conclusion to the end of their professional development in my courses rather than pandering; honestly, I would do the same for grad classes or the end of professional commitments. Who doesn't like baked goods?
I'd like to echo CiT's comments above and emphasize that context matters. If you suddenly drop some goodies in front of the students it may come off as an obvious bribe. OTOH, if it is a regular part of of your style, it can have the positive effects mentioned by Ben above. I had a film appreciation course where snacks (typical concession stand fare) was regularly offered by the instructor. The goodies added to the experience of the course.
ReplyDeleteFrom a student point of view, I say screw 'em.
ReplyDeleteYou are there to teach, they are there to learn.
In my opinion, college is a dress rehearsal for life, if ya can't meet deadlines and commitments in the classroom, how can ya expect to succeed in life, let alone on the job?
While many (most? all?) of the folks on this board share this sentiment, it ignores the fact that CM's tenure application depends on the scores from student evaluations. A "screw'em" approach would lead to the unemployment office.
DeleteI got some interesting evaluation advice last term, which is that one thing you need to do to get good responses on evals is make sure students connect the questions on the eval with what you are doing in class. So, for example, if you have a question on the evaluation about the prof being organized, you spend time in class saying "here is how the class is organized" and you refer to the documents (ie syllabus) where said organization is present, and you remind students several times about upcoming tasks and due dates, each time making sure to mention "organization" or whatever the keyword in the evaluation is.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, you teach to the evaluation. Is this disgusting? YES. Does it work? YES.
Oh, cookies. Remember when we were in grade school and it was common last-day etiquette to bring your teacher a small and somewhat useless gift (fruit, flower, magnet) to show your appreciation for their hard work? How did this dynamic get so fucked up? In other words, they should be bringing US cookies.
ReplyDelete"She thinks she's smarter than us."
ReplyDeleteUmm... Fuck yes, she does!
or...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3oo6p4/
@Whatladder, I still think a midterm evaluation after which you change one thing and explain some others works better. I cannot imagine repeating the keywords of the evaluation:
ReplyDelete"I am ACCESSIBLE on Mondays and Wednesdays for office hours!"
"Today I will show you how I HAVE COMMAND OVER THE MATERIAL!"
"I have tried to put together a GOOD COURSE, OVERALL!"
"Today's reading IS RELATED TO THE GOALS OF THE CLASS!"
Actually, I can imagine that as an improv. comedy skit.
"Actually, I can imagine that as an improv. comedy skit."
DeleteIn the early morning hours following an assignment submission, slide graded work under dormroom doors while shouting: "I RETURN ASSIGNMENTS IN A TIMELY MANNER!"