What's wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four

Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I'm talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it's true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are peers and superiors. In academia, the people who observe and evaluate you on a day-to-day basis are distracted 18-year olds who don't understand what your job actually is. Occasionally you go present a paper at a conference, but most of the people there are strangers; very rarely a colleage in your actual department will be aware of work you've done and compliment you on it; periodically an article or whatever comes out, which is nice, but very long-distance and the feedback you get from that is mostly also long-distance and comes from strangers or bare acquaintances. It's a weird gig, and I swear to god a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis.

So, along those lines, allow me to share a few gems from my student evals. Note that, in fact, I generally get good evals: I am entertaining, students think I'm funny and stylish, and my personal affect is a sort of weird combination of demanding and approachable. My weakness as an instructor is that I despise lecturing: I believe firmly in the research that shows that no one listens for more than twenty minutes and my own experience is that I often can't listen to someone nattering at me for more than ten. So I don't do formal lectures, even in big classes. Instead, I work hard to come up with creative ways to hold students accountable and generate a lot of the "lecture" from them: WebCT discussions, starting a lecture by asking questions and soliciting feedback and ideas before moving on to new points, having students do small group work and big group projects. I run lectures as much as possible as large discussions, and try to make students more responsible for their own learning than they often are in the passive read-listen-take-exam model.

Anyway, so blah blah I have a thoughtful informed pedagogy for these big lecture courses, I think. And of course many students say good things about the amount of involvement I expect in a lecture course, about the liveliness of the classroom, about their level of interest in the course material being higher than it usually is in lectures. But of course it's the negative comments we all love best:

"She expects us to be too mature"
"She expects us to actually be interested in the course material on our own" (this was listed as a "weakness" of mine)
"Professor Bitch doesn't know how to lecture"
"Too much work on WebCT! I signed up for a lecture course, not a distance learning course"
"I do not pay to hear what other students think. I pay to hear what the instructor thinks"
"Her regionalisms [from a different part of the country] bother me"
"By requiring us to post on WebCT before class, she forced us to do the reading ahead of time, which is very difficult and unfair for students with other obligations"

These. These are the people who we get the most feedback on our jobs from. No wonder we're depressed.

Update: Given how much exposure this post has gotten, and how commonly it's been misread, I want to clarify something. I am not saying that there is no place for student evaluations. I am saying that it bothers me that, at my university at least, student evaluations are (1) the only feedback we get on teaching; and (2) really, the only regular feedback we get on any aspect of our jobs. I think it is the latter that makes many of us exaggerate the negative comments in our minds and develop a somewhat oppositional attitude towards our students--a phenomenon that I do not, in fact, think is healthy or desireable. Moreover, the specific course that these evaluation comments refer to, as I said, was one in which I had tried to do something innovative with the lecture format. Most of the evaluations indicated that the experiment had been largely successful, and in fact I plan to do a paper on it, because I think it was rather clever of me and the students produced some very interesting work. What annoyed me was that the negative comments did not, in any way, address the strengths and weaknesses of the specific course or assignment; they merely expressed resistance to the fact that the course wasn't what the students thought they'd signed up for, a resistance I interpret as being laziness on the students' part ("I signed up for a lecture so I could sit back, take note, and spew the information back at you on the exam. How dare you ask me to think.") IMHO, while evaluations are important, one down side is that they can and do encourage this kind of "customer service" attitude towards the professoriate--an attitude that I think is inimical to really good teaching and learning. IMHO, reframing evaluations to encourage students to reflect on how and what they learned, and to offer feedback on how and what they might have learned better, would be truly valuable. Presenting them to students--as if often done--as evaluations, not of the course but of the instructor, fails to do that.