I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: student evaluations are evil. They are an unreliable measure of whether a teacher is successful and, at least in my experience, have no practical value to the teacher either. I’ve never read any comment in my evals that made me say, “Gee, I should change my pedagogy to address this reasonable concern.” I have, however, been kept up at night stewing over some cheap, mean-spirited, or selfish complaint — the kind of complaint a disgruntled student scrawls off in a moment of pique and then completely forgets about, never knowing that it gets burned into the teacher’s very soul.

(I feel the need to add, in my defense, that this does not mean that I don’t care whether my classes go well, are successful, my students like me, etc. I care deeply about these things — as recent posts have demonstrated — but I don’t believe evals relay anything useful or helpful in this regards.)

I have always thought that one of the perks of having tenure is not having to read student evals any more because, as we all know, they really don’t matter to the those protected by the golden mantle. I had promised myself that, as soon as I got tenure, I would adopt the strategy of so many of my tenured colleagues and friends: toss those evals into a dark, dank corner and forget all about them. Ha ha!

It would seem I have jumped the gun. This year, as I was working on my yearly review and writing my self-evaluation statements about why I am so superior as a teacher, scholar, and outstanding citizen of my college community (fluff, fluff, fluff), I had an epiphany: Even though I do not yet have tenure, student evals still don’t matter. There is nothing in those evals at this point that is going to make any difference in either how I teach or how I am evaluated by my administration. In my very bones I know that if I have published enough and in the right journals/presses, I will get tenure — no matter what my students have to say about it. I looked on those envelopes full of evaluations with new eyes: they were meaningless to me. I could read them, stress about them, spend hours of my life brooding over what they say … or I could ignore them.

What liberation!

I turned in my yearly review, including the unopened envelops of student evals, with a song in my heart. I’m either on the right track, tenure-wise, or I’m not. I’ll find out soon enough but, in the meanwhile, I refuse to torture myself.

Oh yes, I’m giving myself permission. Go ahead, try it.