Just over five years ago, I wrote a little piece on faculty self-evaluations that was published at Inside Higher Education. I wrote it when I was serving on the committee that was reviewing evaluation procedures. This year, I’m actually being evaluated (for all that evaluating a tenured professor means), and am forced to write one of those very self-evals I decried (and unsuccessfully sought to alter) in 2005.
In the interests of full disclosure, what follows is my response to the evaluation questions. Doggerel is the solution to almost every administrative query, I’ve found.
Please Reflect and Comment on what you’ve done in terms of your major assignment since your last evaluation.
Since last you asked the same of me
I’ve been a loyal worker bee.
With due respect for learning styles.
I’ve paced perhaps a hundred miles
Back and forth across the room
My voice a modulated boom.
With faithfulness, still I render
Lectures on Rome and gender –
In all this, and in more
I am as in 1994
When first I came to PCC
To be that loyal worker bee.
How has your perception of your role as a faculty member changed since your last evaluation?
I am wiser, grayer, bolder
In part at least because I’m older
But in terms of how it is I see
My role upon this faculty
I remain unchanged in my conviction
That good teaching is my jurisdiction
What experiences and achievements have you had in the past three years that have informed your role as a faculty member?
I have taught and traveled far and wide
And watched while students laughed and cried
Afeared of ever being stodgy
I’ve reflected on my pedagogy
And altered it where I saw fit
To keep the flame of learning lit.
How has the success and retention rate of students in your courses affected what you do in the classroom?
Of every ten who first appear
At the beginning of the year
Some eight will find a way to stay
Until the very final day.
Those who survive that storm and stress
Almost always achieve success
From the figures that are known to me
Few ever fall below a C.
After taking time to reflect, what more could you do to provide students with a successful learning experience?
The very nature of this question
Assumes I don’t do this reflection.
Do you think I am obtuse?
That my skills grow rusty from disuse?
In every class that e’er I teach
I do my uttermost for each
I resent the thinly-disguised implication
That I don’t live up to my vocation.
What can the college do to support you in your professional goals and professional development?
Though I can only speak for me,
I’d like a larger salary
Other well-intentioned aid
Matters less than being paid

I love it! I work in HR, and I find self-evaluations to be pointless. If an evaluation like this crossed my desk, it would make my day. I hope your brand of humor makes someone in human resources smile!
It’s adorable. I like it too.
Show some effort, please. Being tenured is no excuse for lack of proper meter and assonance.
cw, I wouldn’t know iambic pentameter from an Icelandic pedometer, and assonance from… well, you know. I done did the best I could for someone who loves poetry but can’t write verse. But by definition, doggerel is “loose or irregular in measure”, and doggerel this is.
It’ll be numbers people, not English geeks reading your evaluation anyway, right?
This reminds me of something from “The Dilbert Principle,” when Scott Adams was talking about writing his self-evaluation, which many of us are not only forced to write but forced to write our boss’s evaluation of us as well (which adds a peculiar forced third-person element to the whole idiocy). The question was something like “Please describe Scott’s major contribution(s) to the company mission and goals for the last review period” and Scott’s written response was something like “I once witnessed Scott walk across a lake to heal an injured swan. He is Love.”
There once was a handsome professor
who was famed as a very nice dresser
his lectures were stirring
and they set my pulse whirring
in my heart, he has no successor
or
There once was a male feminist
who in gender was quite a specialist
in blogposts and classes
he reached out to the masses
so much cheaper than a therapist!
I was just reading “The Price of Mothering” and in which the author decried how experiences in parenting, no matter how transformative or germane, are never considered in analysing one’s professional skills.
As I read your response to “What experiences and achievements have you had in the past three years that have informed your role as a faculty member?” I was saddened to realize that even you, an advocate for gender equality who values his role as parent, did not feel you could include something as transformational and germane to being a teacher as becoming a parent. It is not a criticism of you, but of our culture that parenting in which parenting is not truly valued.
ChristineW, my goodness, did you think that this was a serious piece I wrote for them? Did you not sense my contempt for the process of self-evaluation dripping through?
Why on earth would I share with an administrator the radical changes that becoming a parent have wrought in my work? It’s all over my blog, as you know, going back to February 2009, dozens of posts that talk about the changes brought to every facet of my life (including my teaching) by becoming a parent.
But sharing that is far too intimate to be coerced in a mandatory evaluation. Compulsory authenticity is an oxymoron.
But as to the main point — yes, we ought to consider parenting a life skill that may well impact our professional work in very positive and meaningful ways. But I’ll be damned if I’ll tell the administration that.
A man with a lecturer’s post
Heard that far-future earth would be toast
So he blogged: “When the sun
Swells and kills everyone
It’s women that suffer the most.”
@Hugo: No, I hadn’t even considered contempt. I had assumed that you were being cute and doing it rather lamely.
@ChristineW: Hugo is many things but he doesn’t do cute. At least not in any way I’ve seen.
@Anon & Jebedee: Great limericks!
@Hugo: any reaction from the administration? To whom did you submit this?
Well Hugo, I hope ChristineW just learned you whatfor.
What I meant was that this was lame when read without the bitingly sarcastic tone. I sometimes forget that not everyone feels obligated to kiss the butt of authority or kick it in the ass. Some people are able to just stick out their tongues and get one with their lives.
Get on with their live, not get one with their lives, unless of course they are Buddhist.
I WISH parenting was considered a transferable skill. I do the work of a team of experts, I taught myself the equivalent of a 2nd year of a childhood development/communicative disorders certificate, and demonstrated just how far the human mind and body can be challenged outside of military service, and still my role as a parent is seen as a potential expense rather than an asset to a company.
That’s just how it is.
Christine W, the “lives” was correct. One person gets on with his or her life. People (plural) get on with their lives.