Anonymous Professor Doesn't Give a Flip about Evaluations II

I've said it before. I don't care about evaluations. The process is flawed. One year, a graduate assistant handed out a whole stack of blank evaluations, expecting students to take just one questionnaire and pass the stack on. 

That's not what happened. By the time the stack made it around the room and back to the graduate assistant, half of them were gone. (Only twenty-one completed forms were returned). The graduate assistant  estimated that the class had purloined about fifty blank evaluation forms. That explains how some teachers got five to ten more evaluations than they should have gotten from some classes. After that, pre-counted forms were given to graduate assistants in a separate envelope for each student. Even then, some profs still get too many evaluations from on class. This suggests that there are more  copies circulating around campus. 

Shenanigans aside, the whole idea of giving a bunch of ninnies input into how a class is run and how a teacher performs is asinine. Non-white profs, generally, get poor evaluations from predominantly white classes. The situation is so bad in our degree mill that the math and engineering departments don't even bother with student evaluations because most of the profs are Asians. 

When I returned to class after my sabbatical, I found a memo from Dr. Blipps taped to my door.

                                                 See me. 

I wanted to start the semester off on the right foot, but I didn't want the department head to think that I had turned over a new leaf or that a "new me" had emerged refreshed, chipper, chirpy, and eager to please after a summer and a semester away from campus. I waited a week to go to her office. I didn't want to raise expectations.

"Sit down. Read these," she said and handed me my evaluations from last  spring. "Read them here."

I met most of the criteria on the list.  

It was the comment section at the bottom of the evaluations pages that was so disturbing.

"The best prof ever!"

"I learned so much. I wish all of my other teachers were as      god [sic] as him."

"Easiest class!"

"Nice guy. His wife is s knockout" This was a reference to the enlarged photo of my wife that I put on my office wall. 

"Made me feel accepted."

"I actually learned something in this class."

"Not bad for an afternoon class."

And on and on. One effusive comment after another. 

"Is this a joke?" 

We said that in unison. 

Dr. Blipps wasn't amused. Nothing makes her happy. She quit giving me cr@p about the negative reviews a long time ago. Now she has something else to grouse about.

This is unbearable. Whatever I did in that class last spring I CANNOT repeat.