Part 1)

I’ve just started a new contract (1 year) full-time role as an assistant lecturer in Australia (in the US this would be an Associate Professor). I have about 4 years’ experience prior to this in both TAing and coordinating units at this same university. When I was a sessional, I only ever had access to the quantitative evaluations on my teaching.

Now that I’m full-time, I’ve just been sent my first batch of qualitative comments from a unit I coordinated last semester.

My god.

The report was really mixed, with both really positive comments from students and really horrible ones. I’m trying to see the best in the horrible ones regarding what I can do to improve my lecturing and my unit as that’s the purpose, but they are really contradictory to the positive ones. Some students love the media incorporated in the lecture, others absolute hate it. Some called me an excellent lecturer, friendly and highly knowledgeable, others called me incompetent, hard to approach and question my expertise. Some were really thankful for the extra resources I provided, such as guides to writing essays, while others were angry that I didn't spell everything out and felt that their inability to do well was my fault.

I know why the unit didn’t do as well (receiving a 3.75/5 when the school aims for 4 and above) as it did the previous year when I taught it. When I was teaching I was quite stressed, having just submitted my thesis for examination, desperately looking for work because I knew by December I would be unemployed, and had issues with a student that I had to get faculty and other departments involved because of the high level of harassment and threats I was receiving. I hated teaching this class, because I was terrified each week that this student would show up. Combining this with being treated for a binge-eating/anxiety disorder and getting quite ill, it just was not my semester.

Part II

Last year at the end of the unit I had students coming up after thanking me, finding the material really interesting, and was sent emails/had little notes thanking me on their final written exams.

But many of these are not recorded in the evaluations and now I feel demoralised, disheartened and frustrated. I don’t know where to begin to try and address the comments to improve when they are so contradictory, and am feeling absolutely worthless.

Combining this with a school meeting I had attended a day before receiving these results, where the head of school publicly declared that they hate giving teaching to contracts because they feel it spells a recipe for disaster, and another member (fulltime continuing) stating that the school should only hire the best (levels D and E) and not do internal hires to help new graduates (like myself, level A) get their foot in the door.

I knew coming into this job that it wasn’t going to be easy, academia is rife with politics and trying to meet student expectations all the while trying to get yourself out there with your research. It is shark infested waters and I know you need an incredibly thick-skin just to make it.

But I didn’t expect these feelings, which are really starting to frighten me as they're bordering on suicidal to take such a hold and reduce me to feeling like a complete piece of shit.

For those of you teaching and have received qualitative comments, how do you cope? How do you handle them and not let them affect you personally?

Hi there,

I don't have any experience with this so I can't help with the feedback part of this. I wanted to reply to this post and try to encourage you. It must be so hard dealing with all of these issues at the same time, and to have balanced all of that for a semester and then receive that feedback must be hard too. But it is definitely not worth taking personally, and even if it was you can't afford to take it personally for the sake of your own mental health. Sometimes when I get into a cycle of despair over what other people have said about me I repeat the mantra "what other people think of me is none of my business". Unfortunately, qualitative evaluations of this kind make you see those things, right? That's the tricky part...
I can't tell you anything specific but know that you are not alone, and your life is worth more than one set of feedback. My advice would be distract yourself from these thoughts somehow (sometimes I find saying "STOP" very loudly - either out loud, or in my head if I'm in public!- every time I return to the destructive thought helpful) and wait until they pass. And they WILL pass.

In the US, you would be a visiting assistant professor or VAP. I say this not to be picky but because I think you might find some useful online resources on dealing with the situation you are in, at the Chronicle of Higher Education website if you do a search with the right terms.
Many academics do feel uneasy about the proliferation of one year teaching contracts that have emerged in the UK (I know you are in Australia) because they are often exploitative and publications are what new PhDs need to get permanent jobs, something that's not easy to churn out with a full teaching load. Try not to take what was said at the meeting too personally.
On evaluations - there's good reason why the qualitative remarks are often kept from TAs - students can be vicious and unfair. And unfortunately it's the nasty comments that stick in your memory and the nice ones are forgotten.
I'd put them to one side and wait for the rest from the first semester, and then look at them in the round. See if you can see trends across units, as those are the areas it's worth addressing. Do you have another member of staff you can trust? Someone else might be able to help reassure you and sort the nasty from the useful. You are always going to get some nasty comments sadly, & if it's a big group they will often be contradictory too. And if you are a young-looking woman, your expertise will always be doubted (there's research been done on this). And sometimes you don't click with a class, and you realise you've lost a group of them and can't get them engaged again, which sounds like it might have happened to you here. It happens. But try really hard not to let your feelings about this affect how you teach your next classes - they see it if you hate teaching them & resent it.

hi awsoci I don't have experience on academia where teaching is concerned, I just want to post a message of support to you. I am sorry that things are not easy for you at the moment. What I can think now, is that if we are in academia-teaching, and if we will be in this field for a while, we will be continuously open to good or bad comments coming at us; in fact I think in every area of work, we will still be subject to all sorts of criticism.

I was criticised by my boss a few months ago, she told me off for something I tried to do in the research project, and I felt so bad. Also, I sent an email to a colleague and had cc.ed in other people, without understanding office-dynamics. I was in the right, but because I had copied in other people, this made me look like the Bad One, and I felt like sticking my head in the sand etc. Very very unpleasant.

All I can say to you, is to encourage you to carry on, and it will feel better in time to come. The first day you read the comments, you feel bad, and hopefully day by day you will feel better.

Another thing I always remind myself is however good we do something, there maybe other people who can do even better, and whatever well we perform, there may be people out there who will still criticise. That is how the world works, so when I think of it this way, I don't feel so bad.

Take care
love satchi

Hi awsoci, I had a similar experience last year, and it was indeed very hard to accept and get over with, so you have all my sympathy!! I received very hard qualitative comments for two semesters in a raw, same module, different groups.

It's hard, frustrating, and I really felt I wanted to give up and move on with research reducing teaching to the least minimum...I'm still struggling to learn how to win the respect and interest of my students, so I don't have real solutions to offer.

However, some of the comments you got resonate with mine. And as bewildered said, me looking like a little girl really doesn't help!! What I did, was to go through the comments with some senior colleagues. It's painful, and I was so ashamed! But it helped. I realized they were not so shocked about the comments as I was. They helped me sort out the useful stuff, the points I could work on.

So for instance, comments on the media used: some loved it, some hated it. So I though about how to revise some bits and render the whole a bit more flexible, but at the end, the core will remain the same and studs will live with it.

On the other hand, I figured out that there was a relevance-barrier to overcome, linked to the way the material was presented, but also how the module was organized. So I decided to change the focus of the seminar to render it more relevant to students, and the school decided to restructure the module so that it would not collide with some end of Bachelor project. Now we're waiting for this semester's feedback...I so much hope comments will be a tiny bit more positive!!

This is to say, it may really help to talk with some senior colleagues, and for the rest, as our colleagues here said, try not to take it too seriously. And know that you're not alone in struggling with teaching and students' feedback :-)

love
xxxW

Thank you everyone for your kind words :) I'm meeting with a trusted colleague next week to go over the results, who also said to ignore the harsh comments as they are common, and the contradictory statements are common as well.

And yes, I am a young female teaching in a discipline that while is usually female dominated, my specific subject-area is male-dominated. While I now have my PhD, I can't use the title until graduation which is frustrating so I'm sure the title of Ms doesn't help either.