The end-of-semester evaluations (we call them CIFs; I will refer to them that way from here on in) take a snapshot of your students' response to your teaching at a moment when the course has just ended/is just ending, on the assumption that this will give them the most accurate assessment of what your students got out of your course. After reading last semester's CIFs--purely to disable the assumption that we only bitch about student evaluations because we don't do well on them, I will say that as far as the administrators at my place of work are concerned, my CIF numbers are fine--I felt this sense of letdown. Reading the comments, I thought, only brings home to you how very one-sided your investment in teaching is. Teaching a course becomes the most important thing in _your_ professional life for the time that you're doing it; but even if it goes well, it will never mean to the students what it meant to you.
And then I thought, this is not a problem with the form itself, it's a problem with time. The evaluation process fixes the moment at which your student fills out the form as the moment at which The Truth About Your Course is forever determined. But why that moment more than all the other moments? And if these things are supposed to measure what the student learns, as opposed to how the student feels, why assume that one day after the course is over is the optimal time to assess that?
Because sometimes you learn from teaching years after it's over. I am reminded of this now as I teach my graduate course on Irish drama and the world stage. When I first put the thing together years ago, one of the first things I did was start tracking down French symbolist drama. I found an English translation of Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam's mammoth symbolist extravaganza Axel, and was startled to see that it had been translated by June Guicharnaud, with an afterward by Jacques Guicharnaud. Maybe it's overexposure to Yeats, but I kind of felt like I had seen a ghost.
Jacques Guicharnaud taught at Yale when I was there as an undergraduate. I took three courses on French drama with him. I was aware even at the time that if evaluated by the standards used to assess pedagogy in the modern age, he would not have been a high scorer. Class was only haltingly interactive--partly, surely, because we were all discussing this stuff in French, which for most of us was a second language--and Prof. Guicharnaud's style sometimes tended toward the digressive and the anecdotal. And yet we--I say we because there were a few students who kept showing up in the next course right along with me--kept coming back. We weren't entirely sure why. There was something we were getting from the experience of being in the room that nobody could quite articulate, and which we'd have had no idea how to represent on the forms. (I can't remember whether we even evaluated our professors. I'm not sure we did.) It was the more baffling by contemporary standards because as an English major I didn't need this many French courses and I didn't ever expect to have any practical use for them.
June Guicharnaud died in the middle of the second course I took with her husband. We were of course all young and had no idea what mortality and grief meant, and yet we were moved to try to do something for him. The day he came back to class, I think, we brought food; at least I remember one of the other students, hoping to cheer him up with an allusion to Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, identifying her contribution as "un gateau a la merde." I heard with regret from a friend several years ago that Professor Guicharnaud had passed away too.
Were he still here, I would have liked for him to know that 20 years later I finally started using what he taught me. Or maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe I was always using it, in some way, and it just never took concrete form until right now. And what I learned from him is not a fixed and finite thing, even now, as I am reminded every time I read that afterword to Axel and mark it up in the margins.
You could look at this story and see it as proof that college education is wasted on undergraduates. I had access, in my callow youth, to a lot of famous names and heavy hitters and most of the time had no idea what they were really capable of. But I would rather see it as a demonstration of how the work we do as teachers eludes crude attempts to assess it. I would rather see it as a reason to believe that some student I taught back in 1998 may be only just now watching Downton Abbey and thinking of The Moonstone, or reading the newspaper and recognizing imperial discourse, or watching a woman on stage and finally getting what I was saying about acting and embodiment. The effort we make is obvious enough to us. The results are necessarily less obvious. But certainly they are not contained in that spreadsheet they send us at the end of the semester. . Like · ·Unfollow PostFollow Post · Promote · Share.
The evaluations I get that are most meaningful are those from students five years out, who say, "I remember learning this from you, and I actually used it today." It takes five years for the history of the English language to begin to settle in. I don't think the institution makes a form for that. But your entry also made me think of teaching Beowulf on September 14, 2001. The Lay of the Last Survivor never meant the same thing before we'd watched the towers fall together when they turned on all the televisions and asked the students to stay together, stay off the roads, and keep the highways clear so that fire and police could go from NJ up to the city.
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