Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
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FF It's the time of the semester at the community college where I teach in which the nursings students I never met before these classes feel comfortable enough to hang out after class and chat. I had a great chat with one yesterday, and then two hung out after class today for a chat.
It was great to hear that they liked me as an instructor, but very innocently they went on to reveal that they were surprised to like me as an instructor. That's because they said that, unbeknownst to me, there's an unofficial "Rate My Professor" site out there on the Internet that depicts me as an awful professor. It doesn't just do that to me, either, it does it to another Math instructor I work with, too.
I have job security about this because I just got tenure this past Spring. My official evaluations for the last five years average a "4" on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being poor performance and 5 being perfection. That means that in terms of percentages, I'm an 80% instructor. Translated into a grade like a student would get, that makes me a B instructor. Not an A instructor, but better than a C or a D or an F instructor.
That official student evaluation of my teaching feels about right to me. After all, one barrier to my getting higher evaluations is the subject I teach. I teach nursing students death and dying classes, so my subject scares some students and grosses out some others. It's not a subject that's likely to get you the popularity to be voted Teacher the Year.
Another barrier to my ever becoming an instructor with an A or a 100% 5 out of 5 rating is simply me. With PTSD, I have anxiety every day about standing up in front of a class full of students. I can't be charming with my anxiety. That means that every night I work hard at preparing lesson plans. I sprinkle my lessons with Youtube film clips and Powerpoints so I can stand in front of a classroom with my PTSD and keep students reasonably interested and entertained.
Even so, it does hurt my feelings to know I'm hated by students out there at this online "Rate Your Professor" site. It feels as if the students that are going there are having fun being Internet trolls who get off on character assassination at my expense.
It's working. Since I got diagnosed with kidney disease in addition to PTSD in 2011 it's been a struggle just to stay off of disability and keep this job. I've made it to where I'm 3 years away from early retirement now. I thought I was hanging on with a "4" out of 5 rating, a solid B on the job. But this unofficial "Rate My Professor" site says differently. It says that I'm a lousy teacher and a rotten human being.
Until my health crashed with kidney disease in 2011 I used to be a hospital chaplain. I thought when I had to leave that career that my life was over. Then I got this community college job, and I got tenure this past Spring of 2016. As a divorcee without kids who can't date, it's all I've got. I thought even after the loss of my hospital chaplaincy career that in this job I had found a way to make a small but positive contribution to the world.
Apparently, a number my students go to this unofficial "Rate Your Professor" site to say differently. I'm crushed. All I want to do is curl up in a ball, cry, and turn in my resignation now. I can't quit, though, until I'm retirement age 3 years from now. 3 years!? Really!? How am I going to make it through getting up in the morning to teach these students now tomorrow? FF
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I haven't written in my diary on my computer since May because I thought that my computer was dying. I got away from writing but my computer is hanging in there. I think that I will start writing in it again. It's so therapeutic.
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Years ago, I won a mirrored armoire from my job. It's in my bedroom but I rarely stand in front of it. Yesterday, I had to have a dexascan done so I had to change into a gown. There was a full length mirror in the changing room. I'm aware that I gained 5 to 7 pounds over the last year from cheating on Keto but I didn't know what it looked like. It was a reality check.
The fact is that most people are too busy to deal with sites like that...so it's the people with the grudges that vote. And the people after easy A's.
Long and short of it...is that it means nothing.
Garden Party (Backstory, Ricky Nelson went to Madison Square Garden to play, but he'd changed his look from a 50's clean cut look to a 70's more cutting edge look. The crowd literally boo'd him. He took it hard. Out of it came this song.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT6bgyimP8g
Lots of love
Manda xx
Gentlest purring support. I am feeling fragile and tearful myself for my own reasons. Here we are, giving you a big hugging circle of support, okay?
Healing hopes for all, no exceptions.
Ouch.
http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/?xid=homepage&pcd=hp-magmod
This is that? What makes people do that to others?
My mother turned social humiliation into an art form.
Look at this as a opportunity to improve. See if you can address some of your students' feedback or more well developed criticism, and just ignore any complainer's who can't offer a reasonable solution. Maybe ask your students, in class to fill out a survey about the class to give to you. For all of my classes in college, I had to submit a survey that asked what I thought about the class, its strengths and what could be improved, and then what I thought about the professor, their strengths, and what they could improve. Polling your class as a whole will give you a more balanced opinion and maybe some good steps to up your ranking. You can do this!! You can be a 4.5 or a 5/5 professor!! Don't worry about the internet ranking, because it is a biased sample. Lots of hugs and encouragement!
i'm so sorry you ever heard about it.
i would stick with what you know to be true, and even better, remember all the students you have helped in special ways over the years. extra hugs
A couple of them came to my office hour today, too, and in addition to getting help with their assignments, we chatted like humans do, you know? One of my students, after talking about a paper she's writing for class, asked me for a good dentist, since she's not from around here. So we chatted about what we like about dentists and what we don't like, and I gave her a recommendation. Those little human interactions above and beyond just talking about homework mean a lot to me in contrast to those cutting comments that judge so harshly on Rate My Professor.
Dance, thanks for filling me in about how students view those sites. Thanks to everybody who filled me in on that point of view. I was blissfully unaware and so it just blindsided me yesterday. I do trust students to be adult enough as you say and to take such sites in context and, when appropriate, with a grain of salt. It's also good, as you say, to seek feedback to get better in the classroom. I'm always looking for more Youtubes and things like that to animate things beyond my own personal charisma so that it's not always just about me. And thanks for saying that an official average rating of 4 out of 5 is good, too. I know it's an 80%, a B as an average grade for my teaching, but I'm proud of how good that is, too, especially with PTSD symptoms going on when standing in front of people. That was cute how you said your professor was nervous one on one to the point that it was endearing. Hope one of my students sees my nervousness endearingly some day, too.
I appreciate all of the support, y'all. I just had another student come in and have a nice chat for a minute. I want to make a point of not dwelling on the trolls on bashing me on Rate Your Professor and to remember these little office chats with students who drop in on me at work. It's nice.