Teaching
evaluations are futile
Daniel
Frias
It's
that time of the year again. It's time to
fill out those useless teacher evaluations.
Yes you heard right, useless. What's the
point? Mostly we just fill in the circle
for average. But even when we have a teacher
we don't like or is not doing their job,
nothing happens.
Last
semester I had a professor that I felt was
not doing their job as a teacher. I filled
up the entire back page plus I wrote on
a separate sheet of paper and stapled it
to the evaluation on why I thought this
certain professor was not doing their job.
But did anything happen to him or her. No,
he or she is still teaching, or not teaching.
I'm
not the only one giving bad reviews to professors
on this or any other campus. But yet semester
after semester they're still here. So what's
the point of filling out these teacher evaluations
if nothing happens?
There
are many bad professors on every campus,
including Cal State Long Beach. Teachers
that cancel class on several occasions,
which is fine because emergencies do happen,
but then we are forced to make up the work.
And what about teachers that don't teach
you anything in class and just make you
read things like you were in fifth grade.
That's
not to say all professors are bad or take
away anything from professors who do teach,
who do help their students even after office
hours, who do put in the time to make their
lectures interesting. But I feel that professors
expect too much from students sometimes.
Everybody has had a professor who doesn't
care that you have a job, a family, other
classes and are involved with an organization
on or off campus. They just give all this
work and expect you to do it. As students
we have a certain responsibility and are
expected to oblige to those responsibilities.
Well,
if we are expected to conduct ourselves
in a certain way and meet certain requirements
then teachers should be held to those same
exact standards as well. We all have teachers
who give boring lectures and expect us to
stay awake and write down notes. I understand
teaching is not easy, but the least they
could do is try and make the subject matter
interesting. I mean that is their job: To
get us to learn something.
My
favorite is the professor who asks you something
and gets mad that you don't know the answer
to a subject you know nothing about. One
professor got upset that I did not know
the answer to a question he had asked me.
Hey if I knew the answer then I would not
need to take the class would I! Of course
I didn't tell him this. He does have the
power of my grade in his hands.
Teachers
are not the only ones who have responsibilities
to the students at universities. Administrators
and people who work in college departments
also need to do a better job of assisting
students with their needs. Too many times
I have gone to different departments to
ask questions only to have the secretary
or person in charge get upset at me because
she does not know the answer to my questions
about the department she works in. (I thought
you needed more than a GED to get a job
at a university?)
And
on top of that they are rude and act like
we are interrupting them. I'm sorry, but
you're working at a department at a college
the least you could do is familiarize yourself
with the material that concerns your department.
I could understand if I went to the science
department and asked them questions about
history or literature or went to the history
department to ask what classes I needed
to take to minor in biology. But I didn't.
We
are all adults now and as adults we have
certain responsibilities that we all must
meet whether we are students or university
officials.
Daniel
Frias is a journalism major at Cal State
Long Beach.
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