Nomenclature, Student Evaluations, and the 70% Rule

The first semester that I taught anything (my student teaching several years back), it was very strange to be called Ms. Jeppsen. I had always been Amy, and I didn't feel old enough to be a Ms. In the years since, I've been kind of entertained by the names my students come up with for me. High school was easy - I just told my students to call me Ms. Jeppsen, and occasionally I would get called Mrs. Jeppsen, but it was almost the same. In college, however, even though I told my students very clearly at the beginning of the semester that they should just call me Amy, that seemed a little too strange for some of them. Most call me Amy, but I've gotten Ms. Jeppsen and Mrs. Jeppsen and Sister Jeppsen (at BYU, of course) and even Dr. or Professor Jeppsen. My favorite of all of these was this summer when some of my math for elementary education students took to calling me Miss Amy. For some reason I loved that. It's the kind of thing that had to happen all by itself in order to carry the kind of charm it did - I would never actually tell a class to call me Miss Amy. But I got a kick out of it when they started doing it.

One of my favorite times of every semester is student feedback time (to clarify, not the time when students actually give the feedback, but the time when I see what they said about me). I inevitably get good evaluations, and I love reading them. I'm not bragging, partly because I don't necessarily see my feedback as a sign of good teaching. In fact, the more time I spend in the education sphere, the less confident in my own teaching ability. It's not just a matter of getting up there and presenting the material clearly - I often question the usefulness of the material itself, and if I were the kind of idealized teacher I'd like to be (and never will be, because it's an impossible goal) I would completely rethink what I'm teaching, as well as how.

But what student evaluations do is reassure me that the students think I'm doing a good job, and this at least is a step in the right direction. As a student myself, I know that I appreciate feeling like I've learned something, and that it's hard to tell the difference between actually learning and feeling like I've actually learned. So when students write on their evaluations that I'm a great teacher, that they enjoyed the class, that I was patient and wanted students to succeed, when 100% of my students rank me 5 out of 5 on responding respectfully to all student questions, then I feel as though, despite my own doubts, I have at least accomplished something. At the very least, I gave a couple dozen students a more-or-less positive experience in a math class, and goodness knows there aren't enough positive math class experiences out there.

I may love teaching, but it's certainly not a stress-free job. I was no less stressed this summer than I am during the school year when I am taking my own classes. In fact, in many ways I felt more stress (although part of that was the stress of feeling like I shouldn't be having all that stress during the summertime - I am most definitely the product of 20+ years of living in an 8-9 month school year). But there are different kinds of stress. School stress (at least here in my PhD program) is the stress of feeling incompetent, and the stress of not knowing if all the work is actually worth the end game, and the stress of trying to maintaine a collegial relationship with the professors who have always in the past been one's clear superiors, and the stress of having to work hard on something that has uncertain outcomes and uncertain timetables.

Teaching stress, on the other hand, is the stress of not having enough time to do everything you need to do, let alone everything you want to do for your class. It's the stress of deciding how to work with students who aren't living up to their role as student, and the stress of dealing with the ones who are trying and being buffetted by circumstances outside of their control (I still have one student who has yet to complete the course because about everything that could go wrong for her last semester, did). It's the stress of having to deal with paperwork and logistics when what you really want to do is teach, and the stress of having no leeway - when classtime comes, you have to be prepared. There is no room for procrastination in teaching.

Someone once told me that, whatever you do, you should enjoy it 70% of the time. The point was partly that you should enjoy what you do 70% of the time (taking into account, of course, that you might need to put in some years of gruntwork before you can work your way up to that 70% job), but equally important was that you cannot expect 100%. With so many choices out there these days, we often think that our dream job, our 100% job, must be out there waiting for us somewhere. This isn't true. Every job has its miserable moments. Sometimes I think that what you're choosing is less about what you want and more about what you're willing to put up with. It's like any major choice. Moving to a new home, for example. When I moved across town I got a better apartment, but I left behind a perfect neighborhood - I decided I'd rather deal with the inconveniences of my new neighborhood than with the inconveniences of my old apartment. Or picking a spouse. A friend of mine once talked to me about the guy she was dating. "There are always going to be some things that bother me," she said, "but I just have to decide if they're things I can live with." (Incidentally, she decided they were, and is now very happily married.) Sometimes I think that major life decision is more about deciding what you are willing to tolerate than anything. It's just how life is in general. As much as we want things to be perfect, they never will be, and part of living life is learning to live with the imperfections. We learn to change the things we can, learn to have patience with changes that are long in coming, and learn to accept and live with the things we cannot change.

So there's my philosophical tangent for the day. My real point here was that, despite all the stress of teaching this summer, it had its rewards. I loved working with my students, as I always do. The student evaluation results that I got in the mail yesterday were not the reward - they were just a reminder of what the reward was, and I'm glad I had this teaching experience.