Today my annual report materials were due, so I completed a task I had deliberately avoided in the spring: I read the evals for my online courses. The summer and fall evals were fine; pretty much anything that wasn't favorable was a fair criticism. But hoo boy, some of those spring comments were doozies.
In my experience, grad evals are tougher than undergrad evals. Grad students are busy and stressed because they have clinic on top of classes, and they expect a lot from instructors. But my spring semester grad students were surprisingly happy. The undergrads in my spring classes, on the other hand, were not. I think the big issue for the undergrads was that I planned for their classes to be mostly asynchronous. I did this based on advice from sources I trusted, and it just did not work out well-- especially for the class I was teaching for the first time. New preps are always hard. Maybe an online asynchronous new prep that started ten months into the pandemic was never going to be a roaring success.
Every year I have to write a letter to the committee that reviews faculty productivity every year, and this year's letter has a long paragraph in which I say, "These factors may explain the grim and painful feedback from these undergraduate students." But I have a theory that I did not include in that letter: I was so miserable in the spring semester, you guys. I thought every single day about what a relief it would be to quit my job. One of the things students generally say about my classes is that they appreciate my enthusiasm, and I did not have any enthusiasm whatsoever about the spring semester.
You know the saying "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy?" It might be true in the classroom too.
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