On Having One Foot Out of the Ivory Tower

Occasionally something happens that reminds me of how my students see me. These moments can be very jarring, like seeing your own face in a photograph, mouth open and laughing, or finding an old audio recording of your voice, scratchy and youthful. Sometimes they're funny, as when, this summer, two students were thrown into a panic when I said, "I have something special for you today in class." They'd assumed "something special" was an extra reading, or a quiz. 

It was cupcakes.

These moments can also be humbling. A straight cismale student of mine who was Muslim and South Indian American once sent me a lovely thank you note after our course ended. "I was nervous at first in your class," he wrote. "I did not know how it would be to study with you, because I was not sure there was space for a regular guy in your theories." He had been taught to believe something about women like me, that I would be shrill and unyielding, that I would be cold, that I would dismiss him. These notions about feminism follow us everywhere we go, but most students do not have the courage to admit to them. I was touched. 

This month I received a different kind of note. It came in my email, in response to a detailed explanation of the academic requirements for my Sociology of Education class. 

Thank you for your forewarning about this class, professor. As a "hybrid" member of the real world as well as a college student, I am not able to commit such time to things like this. I clearly need a class with much less commitment as I am really just trying to obtain a good grade.

He went on to request my "patience" in awaiting the revised roster; he'd already dropped the class. I stared at the email a while. It nagged at me. 

Such time. 

Things like this. 

Obtain a good grade. 

As an undergraduate, I often worked twenty or thirty hours a week. I attended the most expensive college in America, where a thousand dollars in books each semester was not unheard of. I often read entire books perched at the library reserves; all of The Communist Manifesto, all of The Prince. My parents helped to pay for my schooling, and (generous) grants and (ominous) loans covered the rest, but I didn't have a meal plan, or transportation, or money for clothes and makeup and the cheap beers we bought on the weekends. If I got an internship in the city, I put my train fare for the week into a separate wallet so I wouldn't spend it. I never had any money in the bank. This year will mark ten years since I graduated, and my job paid barely $100 a week. 

Was I a "hybrid" member of the real world? I didn't think of myself that way. I just thought of myself as a college student. I thought I was lucky. I was. My privilege, so invisible to me then, is marked in all of my memories of that time. 

I worry for my students, students who stay up until the wee hours writing for my classes after coming home from full shifts of bartending. I worry about the ones who must drive back to campus late at night after a full day of school and another full day of work. "Don't fall asleep at the wheel!" I say to them in emails, fretful and impotent. "It is not worth that. Don't worry about the homework." 

And yet what of spending "such time" on "things like this?" What does my syllabus, my classroom, say about my position in the world? What does it say of my beliefs about education? Where is the space for the working students? Do I do them a disservice by demanding "things like this," or am I obligated to help them -- force them -- to make "such time?" If not now, when? What is this time for, if not for "things like this?"

In the righteous indignation of my student's note, I see myself reflected. It nags at me because the mirror he holds has caught something real about me. I lament the receding importance of the liberal arts. I insist upon proper semicolon usage and read poems out loud. I have been known, I am chagrined to admit, to laughingly tell a classroom of students, "we live in two different worlds, and the difference is that mine has daily newspapers." 

For the most part, they think I am charming and benign, a little whimsical, a paradox of old-fashioned practices and new-fangled theories, but they also think that I do not know how the real world works. No matter how well I lead them through conflict theory and social reproduction, they think that these are only theories to me. They have been taught to believe something about women like me, about the knowledge we peddle, about how deeply ensconced we are in our ivory towers. They have been fed the neoliberalism of Fox News and Teach for America, and they believe that women like me are becoming dinosaurs, that we are out of touch with reality, that the very earth will shift below us and we will not look up from publish/perish to see what the fuss is about. 

I pray that they're wrong. 

Sometimes it cuts a little close. 

I will not change "things like this," though. I still believe in those things, those awful, exhausting, confounding things. I still believe in school. 

What My Students Say About Me When I'm Not Looking

When the email comes in from the Rutgers Center for Teaching Advancement and Research Assessment, it's all I can do to stay put long enough to wrap up my conversation. I beeline to my car, curse at the wifi, and race back to my office, almost toppling a very elderly and esteemed sociologist. Sorry, professor. My officemates are both there (really? three in one office? yes.), so I act nonchalant as I open my laptop. 

But I'm anything but nonchalant. It's time for student surveys. 

At Rutgers, where I'm a doctoral fellow in Education and an adjunct instructor in the Sociology department, students are invited at the end of each semester to complete surveys about their classes. The surveys ask them about the course, but they're really asking about the instructor: was she positive, was she prepared, did she return grades on time? What were the best things about the course? What were the worst? Would you recommend this course to another student? 

My department gives awards for the top-rated instructors and professors each term. I don't aspire to win them, but I'm worried that if there are rewards, there are also penalties. Lots and lots of penalties. I still have nightmares about being called to my elementary school principal's office. Student surveys? 

No two words strike greater fear into my heart. 

We all know we're living in the age of data-driven instruction. I remember from my time in k-12 education the terrible heart-in-throat walk to the auditorium each spring for the big reveal of state test results. We'd get an emailed agenda for the faculty meeting sometime around noon, and instead of the usual items -- grade level alignment meetings, drug and alcohol awareness trainings, exhortations to clean the staff fridge and donate to the sunshine fund -- there would be just one: state test results. 

I taught language arts to 11th and 12th graders in Newark, NJ, so the stats our administration plunked into a bare bones PowerPoint presentation for review felt like a personal assessment of my teaching. Each statistic was one of my kids, and the corridor leading to the auditorium was a million miles long.

When I started teaching Sociology as an adjunct at Rutgers, it felt great to think that I would no longer be living under the specter of high-stakes testing. I still feel lucky that I can design my own syllabi and develop my own assignments and assessments without balancing my beliefs about student needs against the demands of an essentializing, misguided bureaucracy. 

But that doesn't mean data doesn't matter anymore. Far from it. In the business of higher education, student surveys are the Yelp reviews, and I'm the tiny restaurant that opened on loans and a prayer.  

So here I am, trying to make sense of another batch of student surveys. This set is for a course I taught that's cross-listed between Women's & Gender Studies and Sociology, and it was held in a compressed timeframe -- we call it a Winter Intensive. Here are some thoughts: 

• First, I ignore everything and calculate my average score on all items pertaining to me. 4.87/5, the best I've ever gotten (the term I got a 4.31, I announced tremulously that I was sure I'd be able to get a job as an admissions counselor if teaching didn't work out). What a relief! 
• Some of the student comments are adorable, like the one that says, "I was totally uninterested by this course and enrolled just to finish my final minor degree requirement. The instructor made me not only comfortable with material that would be considered taboo, but made me open up my mind to views and opinions I hadn't even ever previously considered. I will leave this class with a wider scope of knowledge regarding gender and sexuality as it exists in 'the fringes' of society, knowledge which I will take with me into 'the real world.'" Or the much more succinct, "I want another minor in gender studies. If I stay on an extra semester, please give Mara a commission." (As if! Oh, darling, that is not how the business of higher education works.)
• Others are horrifying, like the one that says, in answer to a question about what led the student to join the class, "Because Rutgers screws us in so many ways. Needed the credits, the class, basically the university gave me no choice," or the ones that say "too much work, too much work, she gave too much work." Out of 10 students responding, two say they spent one hour on classwork per day, six say they spent two, and two said they spent three.
• I got 5's from 100% of students on questions about my positive attitude and the effectiveness of my responses to student concerns. 
• My lowest score was for "assigns grades fairly" -- a 4.33 -- but it seems like this is the department and level mean, so I don't feel so bad. In the other six out of seven items directly related to evaluation of my teaching, I beat the department mean. 
• Three students volunteered, unprompted, in response to an open question about what they liked about the course, that they liked our blogs! I'm so pleased. 
• In the end, only 10 out of 18 students responded to the survey, even though I exhorted them to complete it again and again, in class and via our course website.

Overall, I'm really happy with the survey results this time around, and I have some good takeaways. Two students gave a really good suggestion: that I grade student blogs at intervals during the semester, rather than just once at the end. I had been giving formative assessment of the blogs along the way, in the form of primate messages to students and comments on blogs, but students tend to be deeply anxious about grades, and I understand why. This semester, I'm grading all student blogs four times. We'll see how that works. 

I'm also going to work on getting 100% participation on the surveys. Student surveys may always scare me, but they do an essential good for my students, my department, and me. If my performance is going to be evaluated based on data, I'd rather have all the data I can possibly collect.