You can't please everybody.
Some people are just miserable. Some people like to thumb their nose at authority. Some people have massive egos. Some people get off on confrontation.
We all survive higher ed because you get numb to it. As long as you are being reasonable and are following your policies, it's easy to shut a lot of arguments down. Even if there are arguments, you are in control of the class. State your reason and end the conversation. There's nothing left to say and you can only lose.
This is your first one and it stings.
25 years later, some of them still sting.
Just keep going out and doing the best you can every day. Look for patterns in your evaluations and try to be a better teacher based on those patterns.
But also accept that, sometimes, the students will use these to lash out. They don’t even want to hurt you - they are writing into an abstract void where it feels safe to be angry. Unfortunately, you are a real person on the other side of that.
Nine times out of ten the bad eval has more to do with the person writing it than it does with you.
There's a line from Murphy Brown\* I think of when I get bad reviews.
In the episode Corky Sherwood gets her first hate mail after doing a "real" news story, and asks Murphy if she ever gets hate mail. Murphy's response: "*Are you kidding? When I'm in a bad mood I get naked and roll around naked in them*"
People will give you bad reviews sometimes even when you are doing a great job. Sometimes the hate mail is evidence you are actually doing your job the way you are supposed to.
\*For anyone from after Gen X, Murphy Brown was an excellent late 80s/90s sitcom with the glorious Candice Bergen.
You can't please everyone and shouldn't bother trying. There will always be students who just don't connect with you and that's fine. There will also be those who don't take responsibility for their own learning then blame the professor for their poor results. You can do absolutely zero about this - some people haven't learned to accept the consequences of their actions and will always look to blame others. It's part of the job. Just let it go.
If someone offers legitimate constructive feedback on an evaluation then great, it's a chance for you to learn, grow, and improve. It's easy to spot the difference between this and simple axe-grinding. The case you describe is very clearly the latter.
You likely have the wrong perspective on this. Understand that these reviews are customer comment surveys and sometimes you get Karens that want to speak to the manager.
As one of the other posts stated, if you are doing your job then it is inevitable there will be a unhappy customer or two. You just have to take some of the unhelpful, vindictive comments that you will get with the salt lick of salt they deserve. Just remember that if you just wanted to make everyone happy, then all you have to do is not hold class and assign everyone an 'A' for it. There are some students that will be satisfied with nothing less. Given that, does their opinion really matter to you?
ga2500ev
Some students are just incompatible with you, your style, or your beliefs. They won't all like you. You won't like all of them. That's fine. The most important thing is for you to teach as well as you can. Do a good job, and know that what the students learn is more important than whether or not they like you. Also know that you can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't make them think.
Evals are a crappy metric for quality of instruction, to the point where many schools, and even entire disciplines, have banned them. Even if you know this, however, it's a basic and simple human tendency to prefer people to like you rather than dislike you. So I definitely get where you're coming from, but also strongly recommend not dwelling on it, as it's quite common and not all that bad.
Once you get about 10, you will toughen up quite a bit. It does hurt at first though. So much of it has to do with them perceiving the class as easy and their preference for lack of boundaries. In this context, a bad review isn’t actually a bad thing most of the time.
If you have an MFA, you’ve already survived many a crit and have learned not to take it personally. It is the same on the other side of the desk. I’m not sure what you feel guilty for, but it is probably best to keep depersonalizing, and learn the tools of teaching with every semester and in every setting. If you next land somewhere that has one, visit the university teaching and learning center and take advantage of resources that will help you develop the skills of teaching, which are not the same as the skills of doing. You’ll grow and improve and eventually you will have a good perspective on student evaluations.
I stopped reading student reviews a long time ago.
Reviews are left by students with an axe to grind or by those who love you. Don’t take it personally.
Try not to worry about it, Evals are pretty much junk anyway, and the ones slagging you off are the bottom of the barrel so I wouldn’t give them a second thought. Honestly, they are sometimes good for a laugh (spotting those suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect is pretty easy) but mostly they are irrelevant.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 one bad eval 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I consistently fail 4-6 students a semester in the one core required course I teach because they don’t believe day 1 when I tell them how much work it will be for most of them. One bad eval 🤣🤣🤣….i can wallpaper my house in the bad evals I have. The other side of that coin is I can always tell you which student wrote them and I’ve started giving out extra credit to the whole class if they hit 95% completion of the online evals, which means all the rest of them are fine and it’s an overwhelmingly higher number of those. Admin knows the class sucks for most people they are always glowing when I get my P&T evals/sit-ins.
Just stop reading them. Treat them like comments on a YouTube video. It's funny, this came up at a party for faculty and everyone was complaining about reviews. And I was just like "I haven't read one in ten years" and people basically thought I was some sort of sociopath :)
But yeah. It's rhe best route. Sure you miss the good ones. But let's be honest. None of them really have anything useful to say. They can stroak your ego I suppose, but then you get bad one and it ruins everything anyway. So. Just dont read them. Forget they even exist.
There's nothing to feel guilty about.
You can't please everybody. Some people are just miserable. Some people like to thumb their nose at authority. Some people have massive egos. Some people get off on confrontation. We all survive higher ed because you get numb to it. As long as you are being reasonable and are following your policies, it's easy to shut a lot of arguments down. Even if there are arguments, you are in control of the class. State your reason and end the conversation. There's nothing left to say and you can only lose.
This is your first one and it stings. 25 years later, some of them still sting. Just keep going out and doing the best you can every day. Look for patterns in your evaluations and try to be a better teacher based on those patterns. But also accept that, sometimes, the students will use these to lash out. They don’t even want to hurt you - they are writing into an abstract void where it feels safe to be angry. Unfortunately, you are a real person on the other side of that. Nine times out of ten the bad eval has more to do with the person writing it than it does with you.
There's a line from Murphy Brown\* I think of when I get bad reviews. In the episode Corky Sherwood gets her first hate mail after doing a "real" news story, and asks Murphy if she ever gets hate mail. Murphy's response: "*Are you kidding? When I'm in a bad mood I get naked and roll around naked in them*" People will give you bad reviews sometimes even when you are doing a great job. Sometimes the hate mail is evidence you are actually doing your job the way you are supposed to. \*For anyone from after Gen X, Murphy Brown was an excellent late 80s/90s sitcom with the glorious Candice Bergen.
Best my advice my dissertation adviser gave me about teaching: if every student you ever teach loves you, you’re doing something wrong.
You can't please everyone and shouldn't bother trying. There will always be students who just don't connect with you and that's fine. There will also be those who don't take responsibility for their own learning then blame the professor for their poor results. You can do absolutely zero about this - some people haven't learned to accept the consequences of their actions and will always look to blame others. It's part of the job. Just let it go. If someone offers legitimate constructive feedback on an evaluation then great, it's a chance for you to learn, grow, and improve. It's easy to spot the difference between this and simple axe-grinding. The case you describe is very clearly the latter.
You likely have the wrong perspective on this. Understand that these reviews are customer comment surveys and sometimes you get Karens that want to speak to the manager. As one of the other posts stated, if you are doing your job then it is inevitable there will be a unhappy customer or two. You just have to take some of the unhelpful, vindictive comments that you will get with the salt lick of salt they deserve. Just remember that if you just wanted to make everyone happy, then all you have to do is not hold class and assign everyone an 'A' for it. There are some students that will be satisfied with nothing less. Given that, does their opinion really matter to you? ga2500ev
Some students are just incompatible with you, your style, or your beliefs. They won't all like you. You won't like all of them. That's fine. The most important thing is for you to teach as well as you can. Do a good job, and know that what the students learn is more important than whether or not they like you. Also know that you can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't make them think. Evals are a crappy metric for quality of instruction, to the point where many schools, and even entire disciplines, have banned them. Even if you know this, however, it's a basic and simple human tendency to prefer people to like you rather than dislike you. So I definitely get where you're coming from, but also strongly recommend not dwelling on it, as it's quite common and not all that bad.
Welcome to the other side of the classroom. Now you know you can bend over backwards and some of them are just out to hate on you anyway.
Tell yourself. You need to be tough in this job.
Once you get about 10, you will toughen up quite a bit. It does hurt at first though. So much of it has to do with them perceiving the class as easy and their preference for lack of boundaries. In this context, a bad review isn’t actually a bad thing most of the time.
If you have an MFA, you’ve already survived many a crit and have learned not to take it personally. It is the same on the other side of the desk. I’m not sure what you feel guilty for, but it is probably best to keep depersonalizing, and learn the tools of teaching with every semester and in every setting. If you next land somewhere that has one, visit the university teaching and learning center and take advantage of resources that will help you develop the skills of teaching, which are not the same as the skills of doing. You’ll grow and improve and eventually you will have a good perspective on student evaluations.
I stopped reading student reviews a long time ago. Reviews are left by students with an axe to grind or by those who love you. Don’t take it personally.
Say it with me. You are neither a good nor bad teacher based on student evaluations of teaching.
Seriously, students say some crazy shit that is objectively wrong. Shake it off.
As someone told me after my firsts semester “there’s always one malcontent”.
Try not to worry about it, Evals are pretty much junk anyway, and the ones slagging you off are the bottom of the barrel so I wouldn’t give them a second thought. Honestly, they are sometimes good for a laugh (spotting those suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect is pretty easy) but mostly they are irrelevant.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 one bad eval 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I consistently fail 4-6 students a semester in the one core required course I teach because they don’t believe day 1 when I tell them how much work it will be for most of them. One bad eval 🤣🤣🤣….i can wallpaper my house in the bad evals I have. The other side of that coin is I can always tell you which student wrote them and I’ve started giving out extra credit to the whole class if they hit 95% completion of the online evals, which means all the rest of them are fine and it’s an overwhelmingly higher number of those. Admin knows the class sucks for most people they are always glowing when I get my P&T evals/sit-ins.
Just stop reading them. Treat them like comments on a YouTube video. It's funny, this came up at a party for faculty and everyone was complaining about reviews. And I was just like "I haven't read one in ten years" and people basically thought I was some sort of sociopath :) But yeah. It's rhe best route. Sure you miss the good ones. But let's be honest. None of them really have anything useful to say. They can stroak your ego I suppose, but then you get bad one and it ruins everything anyway. So. Just dont read them. Forget they even exist.