They're Just Not That into You

Abstract

OKAY, OKAY, I ADMIT IT: I'M A HOTTIE. And I agree with whoever said that my taste in shoes is pretty impressive (I'd say impeccable, but I don't want to niggle). However, by way of an open-letter response to the student who complained that I wasn't available to his/her satisfaction: just because I wasn't in my office the one time you bothered to come by doesn't mean I'm inattentive to students. You have to understand, we profs are busy people! We don't sit around in our offices from the end of one class until the beginning of the next. No, we teach other courses, and we're obliged to attend meetings. Our e-mail is suffocating. We supervise graduate students, and we live for the rare moments when we can slink off to the library, pursue our own research interests, and--hello? Hello?? Hello??? If rants like this have no student audience on the other end, it's only fitting, since the main problem with instructors reading RateMyProfessors is one of address. Put bluntly, RMP is not written for us to read. I'm not even positive that it's us in any simple, straightforward way. Rather, RMP is a medium through which students communicate with each other about the things that matter to them. Like all subcultural communication structures, it comes with its own internal, unofficial rules of interpretation. Not being privy to those, we are unlikely to decode it successfully. That's why our observations tend to the dismissive (It's such an impoverished genre.), the selective (It's true that my shoes are great, but it's totally untrue that the course was too demanding!), the defensive (You have to understand, we profs are busy people ...) and the trivial (They think he deserves a chili pepper?). Hardly the stuff of critical thinking. I suspect that one of the reasons RMP is so disturbing to us as instructors is not just that we're outside of its address but that it lays bare the gulf between students and instructors that persists in spite of our many strategies to democratize our classrooms. The desire some of us have to shed our authority, the liberal pluralism that holds every comment to be equally helpful to class discussion, the dangerously conformist interest in having students find their voice through our courses, and the idealist hope that lies behind peer editing exercises, that students might see each other as significant audiences for their writing, come across to students as performance demands, implicit answers to the question we refuse to answer directly: what exactly are you looking for? This bottom-line thinking is not a function of the corporatization of the academy, but it is endemic to a structure organized around grading. High marks have always been the primary currency of coursework. (Admittedly, as university education in Canada becomes more and more expensive, the correlation between grades and dollars becomes more visible, and so the distinction between students and consumers starts to blur. But this is hardly a new phenomenon.) What RMP shows us is that in spite of our attempts to democratize the classroom, students don't see themselves as the equal partners in learning that we might like them to be. On the wrong end of the gradebook, they don't always want what we think they should want. We want engagement, hard work, and curiosity. We want students to take the subject matter seriously and to put forward their genuine selves in class discussions. We want them to love what we love, or at the very least to understand and respect it. We want them to learn. These are laudable, immodest aims, and the moment we want something less noble is the moment we should reconsider a career in teaching. But let's not pretend that all of our students necessarily want the same things, especially students in the early years of university education, who are the primary users of RMP. Rebekah Nathan's undercover anthropology My Freshman Year., What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student--a sobering account that should be required reading for every teacher of university students--points out that what students want is very pragmatic. …