Customer Satisfaction Surveys--aka course evaluations

Yesterday when I went to the English Department, a plain manila envelope with only my name written in the corner was waiting in my mailbox. As a non-tenured faculty member, I am still required to conduct course evaluations in at least two classes per year. I am apparently an anomaly among my colleagues because I don't mind receiving this feedback; it's usually an ego boost anyway, with the exception of one or two students in each class that I've offended or irritated somehow.

This semester I was in love with my American Literature II class. They were always eager to read, to talk, and to do their best work on every assignment. Sure, seven of the eighteen students in the class had been in a previous class with me, which gave me a sense of comfort from day one. The remaining students kept up with the veterans easily and impressively. Out of three pages of written comments, I received only one slightly negative piece of feedback from this class: one student wanted a more detailed outline of each literary period's major traits. I appreciate and will remember that comment in my next survey course.

Most of the time, I can put any negative comments into proper perspective, thanks largely to my memory of a wonderful friend and office mate at Southern Illinois, who said to me, "I figure the semester isn't a success unless I've pissed off at least one student." According to her advice, I've had an extremely successful career. This semester, I received absolutely scathing feedback from one student in my Tuesday evening class, but on my accompanying essays for my tenure application in the fall, I'm sure I'll be able to state a good case. This particular student missed at least five times before she stopped attending altogether, and she wasn't really present at one meeting: she was high as a kite and seemed downright dangerous as the clock moved in slow motion toward 8:45.

Still, I feel like I should have done something more for this student, as if she's a child I left behind. My usual behavior is to pursue any lost lambs and bring them back into the fold, but in cases like this one, I can approach the experience objectively and realize that if I had excused her behavior and let her catch up after her many absences, it would not have been fair to the other students--all of them diligent and rarely absent. What's more, her reasons for missing class never seemed legitimate--no one can have that many car accidents, flat tires, and dead family members in less than three months.

To take my mind off the evaluations, I dove back into my preparation for my Short Story Cycle course. I'm preparing a course bibliography (so far seven pages!), as usual, but this time I've ordered about 25 articles and books through interlibrary loan throughout the summer and submitted PDFs of each one to the library so that the electronic versions can be available to the students. Maybe I'm doing too much work for the students, but I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't LOVE doing research like this scholarly marathon has required.