Nevertheless, I do read the comments, and I do take them somewhat seriously. I was hoping my students from this past semester (Spring 2011) would "rate" me since I made some significant changes in how I teach English 100 and specifically invited feedback at the end of the semester. Some of the comments from semesters past have been critical of my requirement that they do a significant amount of pre-writing ("Invention & Research" is how my text describes it) for every essay. Students who resent this requirement think this pre-writing is a waste of time (they derisively refer to it as "busy" work). Never mind that students who comply with this requirement tend to turn in better-quality papers, or that there is less likelihood of them cheating or plagiarizing if they are required to pre-write for an essay (one of my main justifications for the requirement, by the way), or that the mere act of writing in and of itself actually makes them better writers. Never mind all that. These 19-something's resent the extra work, resent being marked down for not doing the extra work, resent my attempts to help them improve and become better writers.
Sometimes I think I should just skip it (and save myself a lot of time and trouble) and just assign an essay, tell students when it's due, collect it two weeks later, read it, grade it, return it. That's probably what the other professors do. If the student cheated, or if someone else wrote the paper for them, it's not the professor's problem.
Here are two ratings from Spring 2011:
Terrible teacher! who also might be a little crazy. A ton of busy work, homework assignments are never clear. The essays were easy but the amount of work that goes into them is so much. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS, unless you want to go crazy.
Her work was tedious busy work and i felt nothing good came out of it. We answered questions for "pre writing notes" that we answered multiple times before. She drove me crazy but she was not mean, very nice lady. just couldnt stand the class.
