I think I know exactly the reason why, though: I’m super easy about deadlines. I tell them when I hand out assignments that I will readily negotiate with them about extensions — no questions asked about why they need the extra time. (In huge classes like the ones I teach, it really makes no difference in grading turnaround to get some of the assignments late, since it takes so long to go through the pile anyway). However, I also emphasize that the open extension policy is my way of being flexible, and of allowing them the best possible circumstances in which to do good work. If they still cannot generate good papers, then they will certainly get a low grade, and cannot complain of not having had every consideration. This system, and my frank explanation of it, strikes them as eminently fair, and they often give me high evals. while simultaneously noting that I am a hard-ass grader.

Also, I think I come across like New Kid’s friend: very casual, open, and somewhat eccentric. The kids at Office Park U seem to like that, too.

Perpetua — good luck with the glasses; when I was interviewing for tt jobs in my early 30s I actually bought fake eyeglasses halfway through the process for one campus interview! I didn’t get that job either, and after that went back to au naturel (and eventually landed a job). But anyway, I do think teaching is 50% performance and props can help, the bigger a class the more formally I dress for it, for ex.

Historiann — I’m really looking forward to the next round of conversation!

I too am concerned by the ways in which grade inflation plays in student evaluations. I’ve heard that there was a study a decade ago (or more) that showed that the evals students gave their teachers correlated almost exactly with the grade they thought they were getting in the class. (So you give me an “A” and I’ll give you an “A,” and so on.) I don’t play that game. I think students need to share some of the risk for being in my classes, and to take responsibility for their own learning. That in the end is more important to me than my student eval numbers. (Maybe easy to say, because I’m tenured now! But it was true even when I wasn’t, probably because I’ve landed in a department where student evals are regarded skeptically and are only one part of the evaluation puzzle.)

There is one other big issue we’ve talked too much about regarding evals:the fact that many/some of the highest evaluated teachers are also the higher graders. The inevitable sentence for them to rate the professor’s “clarity of grading expectations” or whatever they say, it obviously all about “did you get the great you think you deserved?” Any professor who stringently rejects inflation will have low(er) evals.

I think I’ll start wearing my glasses to class. It was really hard for me at first because I was a young assistant prof – well really not that young (30), but I looked even younger, so I made up for it by being a complete hardass. That worked pretty well, actually, though it did scare the pants off of some of them. (I have so far escaped comments about “motherliness” but now that I am a mother, I know they are a-comin’.) I had a student who was so terrified of my “draconian” late policies that he sent his dad to class to explain his absence – he was having emergency surgery on his appendix!

We treat our students the same way.

One can debate which reform is least doomed. I personally despair of eliminating elitism in higher education, and would instead focus on treating workers fairly. Criteria used to judge our work performance, including our teaching, should be fair. No moving the goalposts; no defining Excellence as the characteristics of people already favored.

Beyond that, the dirty secret of teaching is probably that it has a pretty bell-curve like distribution: there are a few great profs and a few awful ones, and then a huge bump in the middle of most of us who try hard and are okay and are viewed with enthusiasm by some students and disdain by others; we connect in some classes, and with some students and our colleagues connect in other classes with other students.

All the emphasis on “excellent teaching” asks the impossible; what I think would be more useful would be for universities to think about how to keep students and profs alike from becoming cynical about teaching and learning.

If you are encouraged in the expectation that all your profs should be GREAT teachers, you are going to find most of your profs pretty thin gruel. If you are uniformly exhorted to be GREAT teachers, you are going to find student evaluations threatening and hurtful.

What if universities said, hey kids, here are the great profs: X,Y,Z. Try to take a class from one of them at some point, you’ll find it a real treat. Our other profs try hard, too. If they are awful, we don’t keep them on. But mostly, you are going to have to meet them halfway — they are really trying — and you probably are even going to dislike a few of them from whom you nevertheless have to take a few classes.

And, you know, universities could say to profs — we know you are making the effort to view your students with the same reasonable, generous attitude with which we encourage them to view you. How can we promote that as the basis of the best possible teaching and learning environment given the irregular mass of humanity that makes up this (and any) uni?