Lucky Jane

As the season of Death by Reception descends upon us once more, I am reminded of the last time I said something that shocked and awed my colleagues. See, there was free alcohol, and they were tipsy. Yeah, and maybe I was a little tipsy, too, when we wandered onto the subject of Rate My Professors.

I’ll never forget their looks of horror when I defended the site, but I’d do it again. I know, I know it has no credibility, that it exists for disgruntled, anonymous students to indulge in their disgruntlement and anonymity as they trash their professors publicly, by name and institutional affiliation. Just as there’s no safeguard against one disgruntled student posting dozens of libelous reviews, so there’s no need even to have completed a course with a particular faculty member to post a review. Take one of my favorite mentors, a scholar-teacher who taught me everything I know. On RMP she is represented by a blue frown and someone who boasts of having dropped her class after the first day, because she said “um” so often as to indicate that she lacked the eloquence necessary to profess English. (I can’t help picturing that poster’s righteous head toss.) But then no one’s checking to make sure raters attended the class for even one day, or attends that institution at all, for that matter. That “ease” and “hottness” are on equal footing with “quality” speaks volumes about who uses the site: generally, stupid people rely on these criteria, and I don’t want stupid people in my classes.

Still, on a campus as vast as ours, students need—they deserve—a way to share opinions about us. College is expensive, and in terms of time more than money. This morning as I was working in my office, three students were commiserating loudly in the hallway about their upcoming papers, when two of them shuddered upon learning the other was in Dr. A’s class: “Oh, I didn’t know she was bad until it was too late,” and withdrawing would have meant dropping to part time. I really like Dr. A, but I wish she wouldn’t go on all the time about how “dumb” our students are. For one thing, they’re just young and not necessarily socialized into academic thinking. (And since I am referring to academia, I mean “socialized” pretty loosely.) For another, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were picking up on her frustration and contempt. I also believe most students truly want to learn, and since the serious ones won’t be interested in the teacher lauded only for his extra credit and nice ass, we should trust the sort of students we want to teach to be able to discriminate between RMP ratings.

My preference—as I told my perplexed colleagues at that reception for a distinguished speaker more famous than we are—would be to make our course evaluations public. Our evaluation form is no great shakes (with its random questions about whether our courses provide hands-on clinical experience, for instance), but at least we know the people filling them out actually took the class they are evaluating.

For what it’s worth, the last time I checked, my own ratings were pretty mediocre and completely devoid of chili peppers. I rated a green neither-smiley-nor-frowny face, though in my defense it was closer to the smiley than the frowny. This verdict was determined by a dozen numerical ratings averaging out to more than a full point lower than my official evaluations, which are actually pretty average by comparison with those of my colleagues, phenomenal teachers who understand the students here a lot better than I do. JPU is the first school I’ve worked at with an active RMP culture that, in turn, is part of a culture I struggle to understand. Among the undergraduates, it is apparently a culture of study guides and extra credit, of baked (i.e., cookies, pizza) bribes on evaluation day. I have yet to see the merit in these crucial aids to learning, though I do keep candy in my office for students who stop by.

Still, I don’t think I am absolutely hated by the students. Having checked my spring enrollments, I am anxious to find that only one of my classes is full, though the others are close. Each roll includes at least two students I’ve taught before‚ one for the third and another for the fourth time. And you know what? My RMP ratings seem to me a pretty suggestive index as to why. The last time I checked them, they were all either blue frowns or yellow smileys, with nothing in between. The blue ones were accompanied by complaints about how I grade papers “REALLY hard” or warnings about how my classes should be avoided by those who want to protect their GPAs. The comments accompanying the smileys are much more varied, and I like to think their writers are people I’ve actually taught. Then I really would be brilliant, stylish, and funny, with excellent taste in books. (Notice I can remember what they said: it is for precisely this reason that I stopped checking the site.)

Believe it or not: I suspect my problems understanding the students here would end once I get them to think my classes are easy. I aspire to be the kind of teacher who conveys difficult material with such clarity and imagination that students are motivated not only to master it, but to pursue it further. Before I came to JPU I thought I had become that kind of teacher. I’ve certainly had the good fortune of being taught be such people—among them the mentor represented on RMP by a blue frown and a bitchy, irresponsible comment. Something tells me that my kind of “easy” is not what some, if not most, users of RMP have in mind.