�Ӱ�ԭ��

By Kim Hellemans, Undergraduate Chair, Department of Neuroscience

For the Fall 2014 semester, I received the lowest teaching evaluations in my 10-year career in university teaching. In a way, I expected them. I had come back to work in Fall 2014 after a 10-month maternity leave with my youngest daughter. To say I struggled with the return to a demanding job with two young children at home is an understatement. My kids were sick seemingly every two weeks; many lectures I delivered after only a few hours sleep; I felt stretched thin, completely and utterly unable to focus on even the most mundane of tasks. I knew I wasn’t performing at my best.

So, when the actual numeric scores came in, I was disappointed, but got over it relatively quickly. Alas, it wasn’t until a couple weeks later, when I unwittingly opened up the pdf file with the written comments, that I realized the true depth of what ‘not performing at my best’ actually felt like to the students. Let me be clear: I have received negative comments before – it is part and parcel of being a teacher. Not everyone is going to drink the Kim Kool-Aid; I get it. But this was different. The depth and volume of these comments were unparalleled. In some cases, students had written entire paragraphs of vitriol, eloquently written dialogue outlining (sometimes in an itemized list) all my failings. Two major themes emerged: 1) I’m too hard (and I enjoy being hard); and 2) I am not adequately prepared. One student wrote that I was a “below-average professor.” Another, that I was “a better student than professor.”

It’s probably no surprise that in the ensuing weeks, I travelled through all the stages of grief: I bypassed the denial phase altogether, quickly spent a moment in anger (“Those ungrateful students! Don’t they know I gave up two months of my maternity leave for them!”), bargaining (“If I could only know who wrote those comments…maybe we could talk about what went wrong and why…I could make it better!”), and then straight into a downward spiral of depression. None of the positive comments stayed with me – rather, the negative ones came into sharp focus, penetrating my cognitive space. Over and over again I recounted the comments in my mind, turning them this way and that, trying to figure out “why.” My friends and family were exasperated (“You’re amazing! You’ve won all those awards! Why are you paying attention to this?”); I felt shamed by feeling so badly.

Truthfully, I had a hard time listening to the ‘oh, but you’re awesome, don’t worry about it,’ line of reasoning. Sure, I know in my heart that I am actually an ‘above-average professor,’ but I don’t think dismissing negative feedback simply because it is non-normative is productive. As a scientist, I am trained to listen to the data. Everything is meaningful in some way, even if it goes against your preconceived notions. This is not to say I should have believed the students, and admitted with them that I was actually a ‘below-average professor’ (although I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes veer into that territory), but it was clear there was something that was not working, and I needed to pay attention. After a few very meaningful conversations with some cherished colleagues, I finally was able to step away from my bruised ego and objectively take stock of the “facts.”

The first major epiphany in my path to acceptance was the realization that I have a compassion threshold, and that being compassionate was clearly part of the complex equation that amounted to “Amazing Professor Kim.” Allow me to unpack this. First of all, what is probably obvious is that parenting takes a great deal of compassion. However, along the same vein, students also require some compassion. Every semester, I see numerous students who, for one reason or another (usually related to outside stressors), request extensions, grace periods, re-weighting of exams, or simply want a friendly face to explain their poor performance in my course. Upon reflection, I realized that my response to these students in the past year was often harsher than I normally would be…frankly, I felt overburdened and underappreciated. Ultimately, the perception of me being a “tough and demanding professor,” coupled with low compassion outside of the classroom, was a toxic mix.

Secondly, with regard to students indicating I was often unprepared, or unable to answer questions, I came to the realization that they were right. But that was ok. For now. For this moment in time when I was running a marathon race on fumes, it was ok. I had to forgive myself and move on.

As Henry Ford famously said “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” I truly believe that in this case, receiving the negative evaluations allowed me to really take stock of what was working for me in the classroom, and what wasn’t. In this way, failure is one of many mechanisms in my toolbox for me to use to fine-tune my teaching. After a bit of re-tooling and self-reflection, I’m happy to report that the Winter 2015 semester returned to it’s normal levels of “mostly satisfied” students with a few haters. Onwards!