Slap My Professors
Teens give their expert opinions on their famous professors
Note from Annette
A recording of this post, read in my inimitable accent (sort of English, a wee bit Scottish, a touch American) is available to paying subscribers above. What are you waiting for? Join us!
Here’s an online review of one of the most gifted historians and superb teachers I can think of, slightly edited. It’s not typical of her reviews, but it is on the Internets for the world to see:
“She's nice and knows how to teacher [sic] but she can be very strict and rude . . . She will also get into your face which was rude. Her classes were boring. Graded on quizzes done in groups and essays.”
Well, that’s one way of thinking about her qualifications. 😐
How do you know when your formerly esteemed profession's status is being shredded to tatters? When you are being evaluated in public with uncensored reviews written by recent high school graduates and random strangers.
That was what started happening to college professors in 1999, with the creation of yet another way for some bloody wet behind the ears techie to get filthy rich with minimal effort and without caring one whit about the social or individual impact a site in which students (or, for many years, anyone really) could offer their full and frank opinions on professors’ teaching.
Official university student teaching evaluations are dreadful enough—what idiot administrator or college of education professor got a raise and a promotion from inventing those, I often wonder? These are not the same as peer review, in which senior professors visit a junior or peer colleague’s classes, look at the syllabus, discuss the professor’s teaching, and offer experienced counsel.
No. As you probably know, student evaluations are multiple-choice/fill in the blank forms handed to stroppy (US attitudey) 18 year olds. They are invited to assess a professor’s teaching, and to write (anonymously) whatever they like about a professor. The forms even encourage them to tell faculty what they should do better.
What’s wrong with that, Laing? They’re paying customers.
All right, who said that? See me after class.
Where to even start . . . Well, let’s start with this. This is not sour grapes. My teaching evaluations were very good, especially when you consider that I was a young non-Southern woman teaching classes that were about 75% white Southern kids, the majority of whom expected to find some old guy at the front of a US History class who looked like their dad, and shared many of their political, religious, and cultural beliefs and assumptions. They did not expect to find some lippy little female Brit in her early thirties who presented them with uncomfortable stories they had never heard from Mrs. Grabowski at school. My British humor and lively lecturing*, thankfully, saved my arse.
*Big thanks to Mrs. Julia Lawrence, my drama teacher at Stevenage Girls’ School, and the entire English department at SGS, who brought me to Shakespeare at age 11, and set me up for life.
At least some adolescents invited to give their views anonymously will of course write exactly the kinds of poison pen letters we might expect. No matter how many good evaluations professors receive, it’s the ones that gleefully attack you personally that stay with you, especially when you’re young, untenured, and worried about losing your job and career. Plus this creates a dangerous incentive to avoid upsetting them.
I always remember one of my very first senior historian colleagues, the avuncular Jim Sandos at the University of Redlands, advising me never to strive for teaching awards. “Laing, I used to get teaching awards", he said cheerfully. “But that was before I knew how to teach.”
Yet these kids' views were strongly taken into account at the “university” at which I spent most of my career, and too many others, in deciding tenure, promotions, and raises.
I don’t just write to rant. I write knowing that what can be done can also be undone. And must be, toute suite. Like yesterday.
Rate My Professors (RMP) the web site invented in 1999, brought this crap to a whole new level, with public shaming. Some professors deserved it (the kind who should already have been tackled with peer review). Most did not. And women, particularly, caught the brunt of the online nonsense, especially in STEM subjects.
I wanted to show you my RMP page, but looks like RMP now deletes professors who are no longer active (plus their search function ain’t working well, probably because the whole thing is now on autopilot while the current owners just collect the loot) I can’t seem to track my page down on Wayback Machine, either, before you ask. If you find it, gimme a shout.
Meanwhile, let me be clear: I’m all for mentoring, maintaining, and improving professors’ teaching skills with compassion, with sympathy. But I think it’s grotesque to invite young people, no matter how smart and fair, to judge their elders.
Rest assured, I very much care about undergrads, and about their education. The toughest part of leaving academia was leaving them behind. But I don’t think they’re well served being told the sun shines out of their backsides. They can rail at this fierce old battleaxe as much as they like: I’m not budging.
By the way, US universities have almost finished turning over the care and supervision of undergrads to the last people I would trust with my son (Student Affairs staff*, whom I told Hoosen, Jr. to avoid as much as possible. I urged him to haunt his favorite professors’ office hours instead).
*I make two exceptions. One is Dr. Melanie McClellan, and the other is Nonnie Kate.
So as we prepare to start pushing back, let us reflect on the extent to which college isn’t just about what you’re taught, but who teaches it. We need clever, inspiring, and creative people at the front of the room, or there’s no point to the enterprise. It’s over. But student evaluations aren’t the way to retain such people.
If history professors are doing their jobs right, they will challenge their students’ assumptions, no matter what those are, not just reflect their callow opinions back to them. They will inspire students to want to read. That’s how we really learn, not being spoonfed facts that soon fall out of our brains. That’s how teaching is done in America’s top private boarding schools and colleges. Teaching doesn’t just mean giving you information. At its best, and it should be at its best, it’s teaching us how to think in the context of knowledge.
So, after talking to yet another academic friend who’s watching her university crashing and burning into a wasteland of bad vocational courses, bureaucracy, administrator grifterism, and humanities faculty despair, I got thinking,
If major historical figures were professors in modern US universities, how would they do on Rate My Professors if two especially teenage teenagers were writing? Thank you for asking!
If you have complaints about the following representation of any young college students in this way, please send a text to the Reader Relations Gnome at Non-Boring House, in Madison, Wisconsin. He will read it carefully before deleting it.
Here are evaluations by Molly M. and her friend Jacob, both 18.
Queen Victoria
Political Science
Quality: 1.0
Difficulty: 4.5
Molly: What a Karen. She team-taught this class on comparative British monarchy with Queen Elizabeth I, who is stricter, smarter, and funnier than she is, even though Liz’s teeth are even worse than Victoria’s. Queen Elizabeth does the actual grading, so not an easy A. Victoria tried to make us call her Your Majesty and Ma’am. Who does she think she is?
So, Victoria, as I call her, needs to update her wardrobe in my opinion (black is so 1890s) and cut back on the candy and burgers . She’s really dumb (like she only had to get born to be Queen as she keeps explaining, stupidly) She keeps saying she can’t answer our political questions. Her multiple choice questions are stupid, like this one I copied off my test:
Which of the following would a modern British constitutional monarch NEVER say to someone to whom she’s introduced?
a) And what do you do?
b) How lovely to see you (again)
c) Yes, the weather is rather splendid, isn’t it?
d) Off with your head
What use is Victoria? She should be fired and sent back to England and made to work in a real job. Maybe MacDonalds is hiring.
Winston Churchill
British History
Quality: 4.2
Difficulty: 5.0
Jacob: Funny old guy who likes the sound of his own voice. No PowerPoints. He does all the class discussion, and didn’t seem interested in my opinion, even though I think I have excellent understanding of England after I went there on my senior class trip, and a score of 10 trillion on Aliens Invade London. Sometimes comes to class drunk, and smokes cigars, which is gross. Too conservative for me, probably a racist. Assigns way too much reading, like he thinks we’re history majors and actually care. Uses weird British words we don’t understand like “Parliament” and stuff. What does that even mean? This guy is really old. Like he needs to retire.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Political Science
Quality: 4.6
Difficulty: 5.0
MOLLY: Good lectures, good jokes, rambles a bit in his crazy accent, nice guy, but very arrogant. He thinks he knows everything, just because he was president four times and won World War II. Brings his cute dog to class, but it peed on the floor so maybe that should not be allowed. Smokes cigarettes before and after class, so not a good role model for young people. Talks down to us in office hours. Called me “young woman” even though I was identifying as nonbinary that week, and he claims he once called the King of England “young man”, which is hard to believe. Told me not to be lazy. which was really rude. His T.A.s do most of the work. He pretends not to have a disability, which is ableist of him.
Nelson Mandela
Political Science and Law
Quality: 4.0
Difficulty: 5.0
Jacob: Professor Mandela is a good guy, smiles a lot, but he’s kind of soft-spoken so you have to listen. But he goes on and on in class about being in jail for nearly thirty years, very awkward, like why would you boast about that? It’s not like he went to Harvard. How did this guy get through the faculty background check?
William Shakespeare
Theatre Arts
Quality: 2.0
Difficulty: 3.0
Molly: I was a high school theatre kid, people loved my performance in Hamilton-The Musical, when I starred as Ensemble. I got As in all my classes too. I’m getting a C in this class, which is so unfair. This man is one of the most boring professors I have had to take at this college. The guy talks in word salad. And his clothes are stupid. Maybe he thinks it's cool to dress like that. We only perform irrelevant old plays. He plays favorites for casting: He only casts transwomen for women’s roles which I guess is very progressive, but casting no cis women at all seems problematic to me. But I guess at least I didn’t have to do anything for performance lab except sell popcorn and sweep the stage after.
W. E. B. Du Bois
History, Economics, Sociology, Black Studies
Quality: 1.0
Difficulty: 5.0
Jacob: Boring. Stupid mustache. Thinks he’s important. Has some kind of issue with some guy called Washington, or maybe some guy in Washington? I stopped listening in week two. I am anti-racist, as I often talk about, but this guy is obsessed with race. Way too much reading. Total waste of time.
Emmeline Pankhurst
Women’s and Gender Studies
Quality: 3.5
Difficulty: 4.5
MOLLY: Mrs. Pankhurst does not even have a PhD. She is supposed to be this liberal feminist, but she’s really strict, and she actually spanked her daughters, which is abuse. She does not care about her women students. She kind of has this snooty attitude, always has her nose in the air when she lectures. She’s mean to people just because they don't do all her busy work, like going on marches and going to prison, and being forcibly fed. Don’t see the point, myself.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Law and Public Policy
Quality: 1.0
Difficulty: 4.0
JACOB: Strange. Comes to class inappropriately dressed. Hard to understand his accent. Obsessed with making salt. Keeps talking about Britain. I mean, Britain’s ok to visit, but I don’t really care about Britain. He should have brought curry to class to help us understand the Indian culture. Offered us extra credit for going on march to make salt, but he wouldn’t accept my can of Morton’s from the supermarket as a substitute, which doesn’t even make sense. Very, very weird man. Too much reading
Jesus
Religious Studies & Leadership
Quality: 4.5
Difficulty: 1.0
MOLLY: Great lectures. No reading. But why does this professor only have one name, like he’s a celebrity? I mean, it’s not like he’s someone important, like Madonna. I didn’t know if I should call him Jesus or Dr. Jesus. Awkward.
Only tests were loyalty tests, so that’s easy. Still not sure I would recommend him. Very judgmental, especially during the field trip to see the moneylenders in the Temple. I’ll be graduating soon with a business degree, so I wanted to give the moneylenders my resume. Very embarrassing when he turned over their tables and kicked them out. Be warned.
Weird Al Yankovic
Philosophy/Critical Theory
Quality: 5.0
Difficulty: 1.0
MOLLY and JACOB: We wrote this together to give a shout-out to the best professor ever! Fun class. Easy. No homework. Really knows his stuff, and brings the course material to life by singing it, so we can remember all the facts for the easy tests. Easy, easy A. Kind of strange, but friendly. We both recommend! He got a teaching award from the administration this year, so he’s even more popular now. Register early to avoid disappointment.
Non-Boring History is the work of Annette Laing, PhD, Brit in America, and actual professional historian, also renegade on the run from her last university. All sorts of variety. Join us today as an annual or monthly member for all sorts of deliciousness for the ridiculously low cost of as little as $5 a month.