Not so terrible

We need to do what is called "post tenure review" every year. (A few years back, the idea was floated of having either all the tenured profs, or the smaller group of those who had been promoted to full professor, go on a three-year rotation, where we only had to do this every three years. Presumably the justification being that if you've been good up to that point, you probably won't go off the rails too badly in three years. That never came to pass, but oh well.)

I kind of dread this because I think of "Oh, man, there's so much more I could have done. I could have maybe cranked out another publication" (and having to report on having one rejected is still a bit painful. And I kind of dread going through the evaluations because I'm the type of person who remembers the harsh comments and forgets the supportive ones. (And there are some comments that there's really nothing I can do about - complaints about how the gen ed course is run, for example, when it's something that's set by the committee and I have no leeway in it. Or "too much math" in ecology. I'm really sorry, but ecology these days? Kind of is a lot of math. It's fairly basic math a lot of it, and a lot of it is what I think of as "fun" math - graphing stuff, using equations to predict an outcome)

We also get Likert-scored evaluations, some 40 or so questions. While averaging Likert-score data is not the statistically *smartest* way to present the data, it's quick and easy and the people who actually make determinations of stuff like promotions don't seem to object to it, so I always include an average of my evaluation scores.

(I didn't get the spring evals for last year, I don't know if they got lost or haven't been sent back to us or what).

But for last fall, my averages were

4.18 out of 5.00 for the non-majors class
4.50 out of 5.00 for Ecology (which was what I was hired to teach, after all)
4.22 out of 5.00 for Biostats (which I wish were higher, I really love teaching the class and I think I get that across, but I suppose statistics is a hard sell for some students)
4.50 out of 5.00 for Geographic Information Systems. (I'm surprised it's that high; with the level of bugginess in the program we use it often feels like I and my co-teacher are flailing a bit).

So I guess I'm okay. If this were on my grading scale, I'd have an A in teaching ecology and GIS, a mid-range B in biostats, and a B in the non-majors class. (Which can be a really hard sell and is typically where any of us receive our lowest evaluations). If I were getting less than 4s anywhere, or if my Ecology class was much lower than it was, I'd be concerned I wasn't teaching well. But I guess I'm doing okay.

ETA: Also, faculty evaluations are not 100% correlated to "teaching skill" or whatever you want to call it. While a good chunk of it (and I've never seen any kind of analysis done to try to determine what percentage of the variation in evaluations is explained by "teaching skill or experience of faculty member") there's also an aspect of the class attitude. Everyone who teaches has had that Terrible Class - the one where there's enough of a critical mass of people who really don't give a damn and who are hostile to attempts to get them engaged, which does tend to lead to the faculty member teaching *worse* (I don't think people do as good of work in an unpleasant working environment). And there's also the aspect of some of the classes being less "voluntarily taken" than others....though I will say Ecology is a class all our majors must take, whether their goal in life is to be a zoologist, a botanist, a game warden, a doctor, a PA, a dentist, a pharmaceutical researcher, or teaching biology....whatever. So perhaps I can be a bit proud of receiving fairly high evals in that class. (That may also actually be due to the independent project I have them do. A lot of people complain about the workload it entails but I think it's fundamentally a valuable experience, both as a taste of what research is like, experience in writing, and also the chance to do something that (hopefully) specifically interests them,)

But it does frustrate me that while I may be as good a teacher one semester as I was the last, that I could get worse evaluations just because there are a few really difficult people in the class. 

And at any rate, now it's done for another year.


And: oh hey, the cramp I was getting in my neck that I suspected was stress-related? Went away after I handed the thing in.