Oh, Art Kids . . .

I should preface this by saying that this is not for all student evaluations, and is certainly not in direct response to all students. A large majority of my students are wonderful and I generally love being able to interact and engage with young minds - especially when I get to see them grow over a long duration of time. It is indeed one of the main reason why teachers teach. And for the most part,  I will also say that I personally usually land above the averages not only for my department, but for my university, on my evaluations.

However.

Every semester I realize that I cannot think of a worse way to evaluate teaching and classes within an academic setting than with student evaluations. Yes, I get the fact that we should make sure that teachers are actually teaching - that’s fine. But a large majority of the complaints I get on evaluations stem from the fact that students have not done the basic things required of them for attending classes. You know, things like, actually showing up. Or reading the syllabus. Or turning in assignments on time. And I teach at a Research 1. Things that you would think would be beholden to students paying for an education are somehow lost and then reflected poorly upon an evaluation of my teaching in my classes.

I had one person one semester not show up to a final. No email, no nothing. Then they emailed me wondering why they received a D while proceeding to critique the way I structured the class.

Every semester I have people who wonder why they fail when they have been absent 10 times and late another 8, then get mad at me when they do. These kinds of examples of blame shifting among students are rampant throughout my experiences in higher education.

Beyond that, it baffles me that students think that THEY should be the ones who get to dictate what they should learn. Look, if you want that, save yourselves $40k and educate yourself with Google. The purpose of attending a higher education facility, especially when enrolling the in the arts, is to be pushed beyond your current state of thinking. This notion of never wanting to leave a comfort zone - when college should be designed to do just that - is incredibly dangerous.

Yet then the sense of responsibility shifts from the student wondering how they could have done better, to it automatically being the instructor’s fault for not doing something more. And look, I know that instructors or not blameless. For one, teaching within academic disciplines is generally not taught (a paradox within itself) and there’s a high learning curve every semester for gauging that group of students and how well they will respond to the trajectory of the class and its material. Yet within a semester where I get some killer projects from students - all because I pushed and prodded them when they wanted to do what was easy - we then rely on a system that allows for an uncensored bitch session about reasons why the student thinks they are not learning the right things.