Talking Teaching Evals Picnic Controversy Blues

Abstract

I FELT A LITTLE BIT LIKE BOB DYLAN must have felt that day when ... I saw it advertised one day, That the Bear Mountain picnic was comin' my way. Come along 'n take a trip, We'll bring you up there on a ship. Bring the wife and family Bring the whole kids. Yippee! So, I run right down 'n bought a ticket To this thing called the Bear Mountain Picnic. But little did I realize I was in for a pleasant funny surprise. Had nothin' to do with picnics, Didn't come close to a mountain. And I hate bears. Bob Dylan, Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues, 1962 ... that day when I agreed to weigh in on the controversial phenomenon that RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) has no doubt become. I admit I never heard of the site, and was surprised to find so many other students who had, and so as I am a student who will someday be a teacher I felt caught in the middle of this controversy surrounding systems of teacher evaluation, and so ... I click on the link, and then on the RMP button. I choose my province and the name of my university--surprised, really, to find it there. I accept the invitation to re-organize the list of teachers by department and hit E for English. I scroll down past Economics and Education to where--surprise again--I find all of my professors listed. Each has at least a few assessments, as well as an icon--either a yellow smiley face, a green ambivalent face, or a blue worried face--signifying an Overall Quality compiled from the average of Helpfulness and Clarity scores. If some have more ratings than others, no one in my department has more than ten--whereas the most rated English professors at the most rated schools in Canada have as many as eighty ratings. Some have even been awarded a chili pepper--are thought more hot than not--which may or may not have much to do with how accomplished they are as teachers. I click on my thesis supervisor's name to see her four ratings. I read through the comments made about the other professors I know at the department, including the ones I have only heard about. I check on the professors I as an undergraduate, elsewhere, and on the few of my friends who have recently started teaching. (I even check the ratings of professors I don't know and haven't heard about--as a kind of control--but notice no obvious differences.) Most of the ratings seem pretty fair, all told, at least plausible, and even potentially helpful to a student needing to decide about a professor, a section, or a school. There are of course also a few comments--incoherent, vitriolic, embarrassing--that I can't imagine being of much help to anyone and that probably say more about the persons who posted the comments than they do about the professors being reviewed. (1) I do, though, find it exciting to see myself represented out there on the web--my school, my professors, my class. I recognize ratings ostensibly from fellow graduate students. I circulate an e-mail around the department looking for people who know about the site and would talk to me about why they would go to the internet to rate teachers that each of us has already rated on paper. I would love to buy a body a beer in exchange for a conversation. I don't, I add, intend to reveal any personal information about anyone other than myself. I'm just curious, eager. Naive, maybe. Of course, no one responds. So, I click on one of the four respond to this rating buttons on my supervisor's page and start a feedback thread, hoping to be in touch with someone this way--anonymously, face-and-body-lessly, as is the custom here. Weeks later, that thread remains untouched. Without a response. A party of one. Vraiment pas un picnic, c't'affaire la, j'te dirais, I can almost hear my mom say--or Dylan, had nothing to do with picnics. I wade through pages and pages of likewise lonesome threads. Hundreds of thousands of them. …