“During the 1980s, I taught United States history to American soldiers stationed in South Korea. In one fairly typical class, not one of the students had heard of the Battle of Gettysburg. Perhaps their high school teachers considered the subject a mere matter of military history. But most of the people who fought and died at Gettysburg were ordinary Americans, and our lives would be very different now if the ones wearing blue had stayed home.”

A number of assumptions here are worth questioning. What first leaps out at me is the notion that if students seem not to recognize a topic, or don’t respond to questions about it, it is ipso facto clear that they don’t know anything about it and that they weren’t taught about the subject. I’m really quite flummoxed by these assumptions.

Students refrain from expressing familiarity with a topic for a great many reasons. In addition to the straightforward proposition that they indeed don’t know anything about it, there are oh so many other possibilities. It may be because they’re shy about participating in discussions; because they don’t remember clearly what they were taught; because they’re uncertain about how what they recall will be received by the instructor or fellow students; because there’s tension between what they learned and what they believe; or because of any other of a host of social and/or interpersonal dynamics in the classroom. To conclude that students don’t know about something simply because they don’t readily respond to questions about it is to misunderstand the social milieu of one’s own classroom.

It equally the case that students often don’t recall what they’ve learned until a context for the topic is fleshed out. As the subject is discussed and elaborated upon, gradual recognition and recollection may bring it slowly back to mind.

Students, of course, do forget much they’ve been taught. It’s unlikely that most students could recapitulate everything that’s been covered in a single class period, let alone an entire semester. The fact that students claim not to recall something is a very poor guide to whether they’ve ever been taught it.

The Battle of Gettysburg is remembered primarily because of the speech President Lincoln made to consecrate the memorial there. Without downplaying its size and significance, I nevertheless point out that it was only one battle out of many fought during the Civil War, and that ordinary Americans fought in them all. It strikes me as odd that knowledge about a single battle would be used as evidence of ignorance about the meaning of an entire war.

Finally, my own operating principle is that if students don’t know (or remember) something that I think is important, it’s my job to figure out how to teach it to them in such a way that they will remember it, rather than rail at them for not knowing it.

Many of us (I suspect most of us) were nerds when we were young students, or we at least shaded well into the fringes of nerdiness. We studied, we memorized, we solved quadratic equations in our heads while waiting for buses, or recited as much Shakespeare as we could recall. We got excited by the sheer arcaneness of things. We were on the road to a life in academia long before we even grew aware of the track beneath our feet. And the folks who were most willing to put up with us were probably nerds as well. That is, most of us spent much of our time in those days in the company of people who were busy imagining their Nobel addresses or memorizing the score of Parsifal. These were students who read for fun, who remembered what they read, and who were eager to talk about it.

Why do I summon up this remote and vaguely uncomfortable history? Because I find myself bemused when I hear colleagues talking about what it was like back when they were students. “Well, when I was in college, we….” Or, “When we were students, we were so much more….” You’ve heard these raps, I’m sure. They’re like all stories of a vanished golden age, when life was so much tougher and as a consequence everyone was imbued with so much more virtue. Today’s students, unlike those of generations past, we’re told, don’t do the reading, don’t want to discuss, aren’t interested in the ideas, etc., ad nauseam.

Over the years I’ve developed an almost reflex response when I hear this plaint: “You’re a college professor,” I say. “By definition you were a nerd when you were a student. And you hung out with other nerds who were likely to become college professors. In fact, you have little if any idea what normal students were like back in your own student days. You’re judging a population of contemporary students against a highly skewed sample of students from a largely-imagined past. Students in the old days were, on average, no better nor worse than today’s students.”

“Accept the fact,” I say, “that you’re in no position to evaluate the general caliber of the students in today’s classes based on your own past experiences. And then acknowledge that you haven’t really been sentenced to a life in exile among the barbarians. The reason you excelled as an undergrad, and got good enough grades to get into grad school, is precisely because so many of those around you weren’t really concerned with whether they excelled or not. They simply wanted the basics of an education. You’re only here today because of their beneficence.”

I’m exaggerating, of course, to make a point. But not by a lot. Think about it. And lighten up a little.

(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)

I take a deep breath and write that I find I have deep and progressively more distressing doubts about the worth and efficacy of teaching evaluations, at least as they exist at Baruch College. There, I’ve said it.

I lay no claim to having systematically studied Baruch’s evaluations as a whole. But I carefully scrutinize every evaluation of every member of my department every term, and as a member of the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Personnel and Budget Committee I see the evaluations of every member of the arts and sciences faculty who comes before the committee for personnel actions, including reappointments, tenure and promotion, and sabbaticals. I’m probably as familiar with the college’s teaching evaluation patterns as anyone. And among the things I see are several consistent tendencies that trouble me. Trouble, as in “Why do we put so much emphasis on such imperfect instruments.” Let me quickly note that I wish the college paid a whole lot more attention to the importance of teaching in tenure and promotion processes than it does; what I’m talking about here are the evaluations, not the teaching. And, because this is a blog, I’m not going to go into detail; I’m merely pointing out some of the issues that concern me.

First, it is my considered opinion that our evaluation format serves primarily as a popularity contest. Because I’ve observed all my faculty (except some of the very newest GTFs and adjuncts) in the classroom, I have a sense of the relationship between what I can actually see of their skills and how students rate them. There is some consistency at the lower end, I think; people who are in my opinion less than skilled teachers do tend to get lower ratings, but I’m not sure there’s a strong correlation here. What I do find consistently, though, is that nice guys tend to finish first. I’ve seen accomplished teachers get lower scores because of their personalities. And I’ve seen at least one colleague consistently receive 5.0s while teaching not much differently than anyone else in our department. I have come to the conclusion that students tend to rate their profs by how much they like them, not by how skillful or effective their teaching is.

When I examine the entire range of items on a single evaluation printout, I find very little variation from item to item (though I would exclude from this generalization the final items about improvements in communication skills, etc., on the new forms). That is, if students approve of their instructors on the whole, they tend to rate them highly on every individual item. They tend to discriminate minimally among the different qualities the form asks them to evaluate. The fundamental idea behind our format is for us to receive useful feedback about our performances on specific aspects of our teaching (i.e., commentary on where we could use improvement), but I have little sense that this is what is actually happening.

The scores of a significant majority of my department’s faculty cluster rather closely together. While a few get scores in the mid to high 3s, and thus lower the department’s mean a bit, most get scores between 4.2 and 4.6. On the one hand, this isn’t a bad thing; it’s nice to see so many fine teachers in my department. On other hand, how do we make sense of a 5-point scale when almost everyone’s scores lie within a 4 decimal point range near the top? I’d like to be able to take teaching evaluation scores into account in my decision-making, but I can’t seriously make discriminations between people when nearly all the scores are bunched together this way, nor does this pattern incline me to think that students are employing their critical faculties when they evaluate us.

There is much more to be said about this. Most of you are familiar with many of the other criticisms that are regularly leveled against the evaluation process and format. I’ve opened the valve just a bit to release some of the pressure. I repeat, my comments here are in no way meant to downplay the importance of teaching. To the contrary, I so value good teaching that I’m troubled by how poorly we evaluate it. We are using an inherently flawed process as a guide to making critical tenure and promotion decisions. Experience tells me that it is next to impossible to change our evaluation procedures (it took 25 years or so to achieve the last changes to our format, changes I see as mostly cosmetic, though there are those who disagree with me about this), and I reluctantly acknowledge that I don’t have any alternative clearly in mind. I just thought I’d use this occasion to rant a bit.

In the course of a casual conversation with our Provost after I had written this, I mentioned some of these thoughts. He was surprised at my conclusions and told me research shows that evaluations are valid instruments. But as we pursued the topic a bit, it became clear that what he’s talking about-at least as I understood him-is the difference between someone with 2.5 and someone with a 4.5. Yes, I recognize that these evaluations can be used to spot the occasional complete incompetent. But that’s not how we use them most of the time; it’s actually quite rare to find someone consistently below 3.5 and there really aren’t all that many people consistently below 4.0, at least in the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Most of you are probably familiar with the old saw: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I once heard a coda: Those who can’t teach, teach pedagogy. I used to find the notion funny, but as I’ve observed new faculty beginning their careers over the years I’ve come increasingly to appreciate just how much craft goes into teaching. Good teachers may make it seem effortless, but it’s not. This perhaps explains why many folks think that teaching doesn’t call for as much a skill as other occupations. One antidote to this tendency to overlook the techniques we’re employing in the classroom is to devote a bit of time to pointing out to our students just what it is we’re doing. This can serve both to make them aware of the cues and signals we’re sending them, and to get them to understand how they can put this awareness to work in the rest of life. Here are a couple of the very simple things I point out to my students.

One is the way I use the whiteboards. I’ve never adopted PowerPoint because for me it seems to constrict spontaneity, creative flow, and opportunities to let students’ questions and arguments shape the direction of the class. I can write something on the whiteboard and then come back to it as often as I find myself needing to in the course of a lecture or discussion. Sometimes I return again and again to a key concept. At some point early in the term, I stop and point out to students that if they pay attention to what I’ve been doing, they will see that a particular term or phrase or illustration on the board has gradually acquired a halo of surrounding emphases, underlining, circling, stars, etc. “If you see a concept on the board that’s been well marked-up,” I tell them, “you should be sure to mark it up in your notes. Highlight it, draw big arrows pointing to it. I can assure you that when you’re writing your essays it’s a concept you’re going to want to include, to explain, and to emphasize.”

Likewise, when we’re reading in class, going over crucial passages in whatever text has been assigned, I explain to them that they should be highlighting the passages I’m dwelling on. And if I repeat a phrase or passage several times, slowing down and reading it dramatically, I tell them they should be marking it up accordingly, because it’s something that’s bound to be useful when they’re writing about the reading. (I note in passing here that that despite all the problems with the high costs of books, I urge my students to purchase their own used copies so that they can bring them to class and read and mark them along with me.)

One more example. I occasionally stop and exhort my students to be clever enough to figure out just what it is that Prof. Petersen wants from them, and then give it to him—it’s what we used to call “psyching out” the professor. College, I tell them, is real life, not simply an interlude before it begins. “When you get a job,” I explain, “one of your primary tasks is to figure out what your bosses want from you, and then give it to them. The classroom’s no different, really. I’m trying to teach you things I think are important, and I’m doing all I can to get you to pay attention to them. So pay attention to me, figure out—based on these cues, subtle or direct—what it is I think is most important, learn it, and then write essays that demonstrate to me that you’ve learned it. (This doesn’t mean rote memory, just a focus on key ideas.) Voila! You’ve figured out how to get promoted at your first job.” Simplistic, perhaps. But these are all small ways of showing students how to observe what’s going on around them, how to gauge what’s important, and how to find out what they’re being expected to know and do.

(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)

Students come to us with a range of knowledge about many things (although many of us are much more concerned about what they seem not to know). I think it helps enormously to find out what our students do know and then put this information to use as starting points-the places where we can begin grafting on the new concepts we seek to impart to them. If we simply begin tossing out information, without having a sense of what students are able and ready to do with it, we run the risk of having it hurtle right past them, without finding any place to attach. If we take some time to find out what they already know, then we can graft the new material onto a trunk full of sap that will help the new ideas blossom and fruit.

I often come to a full stop before starting a new topic and spend a little time feeling the class out. I pass out blank index cards and ask them to answer a few questions anonymously. Then I read them out to the class, so that we all get some sense of what the group collectively knows and doesn’t know. In the course of this I’m able to begin planting seeds of interest, to provoke some of them into curiosity, and to help them reflect on what it is they’ve already learned somewhere else but thought they’d forgotten (and it also assures them that they do know something). And then I work to graft the new material onto what we’ve found they already know.

(Glenn’s caveat: I’m writing this for new teachers, folks still struggling to find their way in the classroom, and not for seasoned professionals, though the old salts among you are welcome to it.)