After more than 15 years of teaching college and graduate courses, I am no longer apprehensive about receiving teaching evaluations. Over the years, I have honed my pedagogical skills, taken stock of my performance, and eaten my share of humble pies after perusing stacks of multiple-choice and discursive evaluations of my teaching style. I’ve even peeked at my RateMyProfessor responses and found them to be generally complimentary. If anything, my overall scores in the various metrics of student evaluations have been gradually inching upward.
So, imagine my reaction when I glanced at the latest summary of my student evaluations and realized it was a bloodbath. Had there been a mistake? Did I receive somebody else’s teaching evals? This can’t be me, I thought. But it was me, and I had just been crushed.
