I was 29 years old. I was midway through my doctoral program and had just brought a certain Zander Paul Rust into the world. We were living the blurry dream of a family of four with a newborn and three year old; supported by a single income from my nurse husband; no family in town; me teaching courses for my doctoral fellowship; and my husband and I working ten hour shifts each week in our daycare cooperative, the only care for our young children we could afford at the time. But oh how I loved those days. I rode my bike to and from classes and returned home to nurse to sleep whichever kid was a baby at the time while reading Friere or Kress or Foucault or whatever absurd theory or research methods article I was being assigned at the time. I was under water most of the time, but I loved that water. Unlike the preceding stressful years I had experienced teaching high school English at a large public school, I felt nearly 100% fulfilled and at home.
And then, I got a few negative course evaluation comments from some students and I nearly quit everything.
This may seem insane to you, and it absolutely, logically was. But the existential crisis I went through was real. I wasn’t used to winning all the things (I was rejected from some research grants, I was typically the last to get picked for a team, and popularity in high school was not really my strong suit) but winning my students’ affection had been my hallmark. This wasn’t my first rodeo teaching my college; it was in fact my fourth semester. How could I have gone from the coolest, smartest, most fun prof to these so-so ratings with occasional jabs. One comment read, “Mrs. Rust means well, but she talks too much about her newborn baby when she starts class.” Another comment read, when asked “what is your favorite part of the class” . . . “when it ends.” The crazy thing was, I didn’t see it coming. Typically I can somewhat read the room. I had no idea the students secretly resented me.
I remember calling my graduate advisor at the time on the phone and she laughed out loud to me when I read my numerical scores to her. “Those are better numbers than I got last semester,” she said. “Don’t let a few negative comments get you down.”
I stammered out a question of sorts: “Do you think I should even be trying to become a professor with this kind of feedback?”
Once again, she laughed. “Julie, you have a whole career ahead of you. This is just the beginning. You shouldn’t have it perfect yet.”
I hung up the phone a bit relieved, but no less wounded. I had to learn more. I had to get better. I had to DO something with all the pent up negative energy. I emailed a student in the class who (I believe) I had a decent rapport with to ask if she’d be willing to give me some in-person feedback about the class. I’m not sure if this was a move of resilience or insanity. But she met with me, and I learned a lot. The students had picked up on the fact that I hated the textbook I was forced to use for the class. That made several students think the class was a joke. Even more relevant, though, was that the English Education students I had that particular semester had another class taught by a full time middle school teacher in the field for their middle school methods. Students in her class had access to constant, applied materials and experiences with actual middle school kids. It was, by all measures, just a better class. On top of this, the student I met with mentioned that this instructor regularly bad-mouthed grad students and profs at my R1 institution. “Those people have been out of the field too long,” she would say, “you can’t believe a word they say.” She was one of those instructors that didn’t have a Ph.D. but had ALL the street cred, and she’d culminate each semester with a huge party at her house for her new future teacher besties.
How could I compete? I had a two month old and an apartment that couldn’t fit more than five people in it at a time. Still, even in my resentment I recognized that this instructor had some things right about teacher education. I immediately emailed her to see if I could learn from her on how she structured the class.
She was gracious enough to invite me to meet her after school one day, and there I sat in her slightly-middle-school-smelling classroom taking notes like a crazy person. I radically shifted my classes after that to incorporate more practice based methods. And perhaps more importantly I got just a slightly tougher layer of skin. Once you experience less-than-perfect comments, the next time you get some rough feedback a part of you kicks in: “You survived this last time; you’ll survive it again.”
I have NO idea if those students that put in a few negative course evaluation comments were actually pointing out real deficits or were just kind of feeling mean that day. And I am conflicted/mixed (like most of the research) about how seriously we can take all student course perception feedback. But here’s what I do know: I will use every bit of information I can get to improve in my craft. I will no longer plan to abandon ship the minute one person says something I don’t want to hear about my performance. My sense of worth is not dependent on what others write about me on a piece of paper. And, perhaps most importantly:
“Julie, you have a whole career ahead of you. This is just the beginning. You shouldn’t have it perfect yet.”
Footnote: If anyone else out there struggles with differentiating your sense of self from what others think/say about you, I have to say this book (Everything Isn’t Terrible, by Kathleen Smith) has been a HUGE help for my people-pleasing self.