Timing

Yesterday I had to let my students fill out teaching evaluation forms. I've had just enough bad experiences with students evaluating me to make me dread this. These kids all act polite and nice to you, but let them fill out something anonymous and it's scary to see how much they don't actually like you. And depressing. Not that I think I'm best friends with my students or anything, but geez! I had one time where a student lied on her form and said that I'd cancelled class because I'd gotten engaged and no REAL professor would do that (the reason I'd cancelled was because my Grandma turned 90; and ironically enough, all of my (real) professors had ALSO cancelled class for that same day!) and that I'd forgotten to bring my slides to class once (the computer was broken so I couldn't access my slides, so I ran to another building and emailed them all to myself, and then when THAT didn't work, I broke down the powerpoint slide into three smaller slides and emailed them AGAIN; and with all that running around, I only started five minutes late; I thought it was one of my finer moments!).

So yeah, with a history like that, it's hard to get excited about these things. Last Tuesday was a test day, so there was no WAY I was letting them evaluate me after taking a test. So I figured I probably needed to do it Thursday (yesterday), before the administration got after me or something. But I made a mental note to myself that I would NOT give them back their tests (with a few not-so-impressive scores) till after they'd done the evals... I'd planned it as well as I could. So go figure-- my two top students were both gone! They probably would have been the nicest to me! One of them even told me she was impressed that I'd managed to cover so much information so fast without making it completely confusing! AARGH! So once again I'm back to dreading what they'll say about me. Sometimes it's a hard-knock life!