Re: student evaluations

[Deb Burns <DBURNS@URIACC.URI.EDU>]

Dear Wcenter folks: I'm so glad to be seeing this discussion of student
evaluations because for the first time in my teaching career, I got a very
mixed bag of evaluations, and frankly it's been somewhat devastating and
demoralizing for me. I started my first semester at a tenure track job and
I taught one semester of fycomp      completely in a computer lab/classroom.
I don't think anyone else at my college has ever done this before, and
frankly the students were a bit freaked out. I have taught many sections like
this at a different school, but again this was the first time at the new job.
The class focus was writing on the internet. The students studied the
rhetoric and culture of a listserv, wrote papers on different internet issues,
and created a collaborative annotated bib. They wrote a total of

almost 100 pages of text,(with 3 drafts of 4 major papers), summaries,
and writing to real people on the net. My most common criticism was that
it wasn't a WRITING class, but a computer class. Many students resented
having to write on computers, and many said I didn't teach writing because
I didn't teach punctuation and grammar ( I did, but in the context of their
own writing). A few of them said they'd never recommend my fy comp class to
anyone because of the computers.  This is so upsetting because I feel that
I am giving them a chance to write to real people, a chance to use the
writing tools of the 90's, yet I'm encountering such resistance.


I'm not going to give up, but it's obvious I have to really make the
focus on writing explicit in my classes. I think I'm upset because I thought
things had gone pretty well and they obviously hadn't. In addition,
my first semester annual review isn't going to reflect my true abilities
as a teacher (at least to any tenured faculty reading them, anyway). Thanks
for allowing me to vent, and thanks for sharing the similar stories and
advice. Deb Burns