Refusing to allow oneself to be driven out by discrimination — valid.

I was just saying to a colleague today: the sex bias in evaluations (peer and student, unfortunately) is really disgusting. Absolutely anything can be turned into a negative in a woman’s professional record, and any potential flaw or weakness in a man’s record can be massaged to reflect his stunning awesomeness.

One male colleague called me a fascist control-freak in the classroom. That was interesting since the closest he’d come to observing my teaching was walking past an open classroom door a few times. But I was not ladylike, after all, after the time I’d shut down his attempt to make awkwardly persistent comments about my dress.

As the song says, “one went to Chicago, the other to St. Paul,” literally. When they had a chance to go they went, and good for them and unfortunate for us. We still teach the bread-and-water course and we all get raked and strafed for it, but in very different ways.

Frankly, I think Jackie is getting ready to blow.

I agree that some people have a special teaching fairy dust and everything they do is totally awesome–but the rest of us schleppers need to understand the component parts of teaching effectiveness, and to do our best with what we’ve got.

Your point about the nebulous criteria for this emotional caretakeing — particularly the refusal to point to actual instances of the behavior in question or to specifically address ways to alter that behavior is the key here.

Last week I was in one of these Center for Teaching and Learning classes that we are required to take. This one was on how to prepare for our performance review. Half of the class was devoted to this tired old exercise (and by “tired” I mean that this was not the first nor the second time that I sat through it) on “what makes a good/bad teacher.” The “good” column was filled with all of these non-specific subjective terms.

In a class about a performance review, this bothered me. Don’t tell me a good teacher should be “accomodating.” Tell me exactly what behaviors indicate that a good teacher is being “accomodating.” If something as undefined as “accomodating” or “available” or “caring” or “compassionate” is going to be part of my evaluation, well, that almost feels like a trap. The same sort of trap that Ellen and Jackie seem to have fallen into. It leaves room to assault a person for “feelings” rather than for their ability to do their job well. Plus, this feelings issue was sprung on them at the end, not somewhere earlier when, if there really is a problem of communication or lack of understanding of “the way we do things here” or so forth, it could be prevented from becoming a bigger problem — just as Dr. Crazy describes.