Dec 14th, 2000
Student Evaluations
Even more ridiculous than the telephone interviews were the student evaluations that we were asked to write each month. Each student had their own “student card,” which provided a quantitative score of their skill in the following categories: writing, speaking, grammar, pronunciation, and classroom behavior.
Come the last week of each month, our Korean partner teacher would provide us with the updated version of the student card and their new scores for the month. The foreign teacher would then provide their own score and average the two numbers together. These averages would go on an individual student evaluation sheet, along with a brief paragraph description of the students’ performance, and was sent home to the parents.
Individually, this might not seem like such a difficult task, but the fact of the matter was that each foreign teacher was accountable for about fourteen different classes and a typical class would contain about eight or nine students. Consequently, each foreign teacher was accountable for about 120-140 student evaluations each month. Doing these student evaluations became a dreadful chore on par with the phone conversations, and much like the phone conversations, the quality of these evaluations underwent substantial degradation as the months passed.
During the first few months, I took my responsibilities as a teacher very seriously and put a lot of effort into each individual student evaluation, straining to accurately portray their writing ability as a decimal and encapsulate their essence in the span of a four line paragraph. Here is an actual example of one of my first efforts at writing a student evaluation:
Emily is an extremely bright and dedicated student. She has the ability to perform and a consistently outstanding level. I sometimes feel as though she feels a bit shy and tends to offer short responses to questions in class. From her written work, it is fairly obvious to me that she has a great degree of ability. I would encourage her to be more outspoken during class so that she may really develop her verbal capabilities.
It took me about eight or nine minutes to really formulate a paragraph that I felt was an accurate portrayal of this particular student’s academic performance. Multiply eight minutes multiplied times 120 students, and you have 960 minutes total. 960 minutes divided by sixty minutes gives you sixteen hours. Sixteen hours/month spent on student evaluations is absolutely ludicrous. I spent the majority of my weekend during that first month, grinding through evaluation after evaluation, until I could no longer associate the students’ names with their faces and my mind became a jumbled blur of decimals, adjectives, and Korean faces. After that first weekend, I decided that it would be in my best interests to become more “efficient” in the manner at which I approached the student evaluations.
I managed to decrease the average time spent/evaluation from eight minutes to about thirty seconds, and subsequently, I managed to cut back the total time spent on doing those stupid evaluations from an original value of sixteen hours, to a more manageable 1.5 hours. Granted, in the process of becoming more efficient with my time management skills, a certain amount of aesthetic value was lost with regard to the paragraph descriptions. Here is an example of the type of evaluation that I wrote during the third month for the same student:
- Emily is good and hard working.
- She is smart and a good student.
- I think she is fine. More work on talking needed.
It was not long until my supervisor approached me with a copy of one of my student evaluations and abruptly explained to me that this was not satisfactory and I would need to fill the confines of the allotted space. In response to her unfair request, I referenced chapter five of my “how to pass high-school without working very hard,” the chapter entitled “How to stretch a three page paper into a five page paper through a combination of font and margin manipulation.” This is the evaluation that I came up with:
- Emily is good and hard working.
- She is smart and a good student.
- I think she is fine. More work on talking needed.
Well, it wasn’t too long until my supervisor came to me again. Surprisingly, my font manipulation tactics managed to avoid her criticism. Instead, she told me that the comment that I had made was not only the same comment I had made last month to the same student, but that I had also used the same comment for about thirty other students.
After I pointed out to her that it wasn’t exactly the same paragraph because I had changed the word “Emily” in each of the other students’ paragraphs, she bluntly told me that “I had to write a different paragraph for each student,” and then walked away.
After that month, I more or less decided to play by the rules with regard to the student evaluations and I made sure that each and every evaluation would be like a snowflake, unique and beautiful.
- Emily is like a soaring seagull, flying high over the oceans of this planet.
- She is serene like a cloud, floating over the hills and valleys.
- She is strong like a large turtle with a strong shell, ambling over logs.
- Oh yeah, she needs to work on her speaking skills a bit more.
After that, my supervisor more or less left me to my own devices.
