Recently, as the end of the semester approached, I sat down with my co-teacher to prepare an overview of our class as part of the student progress reports that my Religious School sends out twice a year. To my surprise, it only took about twenty minutes for us to condense these past four months into a paragraph. Yet a few days later, as I sat in my sister’s apartment in New York ready to begin my winter break from University, I found myself faced with an unsettling uncertainty about how to approach the individual student evaluations.
At Wesleyan University where I have studied for the last two years, at the end of every semester the student body receives a horde of emails reminding each student to fill out an on-line teacher evaluation for their courses— or face the consequence of not receiving final grades until the following semester. As these same emails are sent out year after year, I’m assuming that this threat of withholding provides satisfactory results regarding a professor’s progress.
Generally in the position of assessing the teacher, however, it is a startling shift to that of measuring the student. In a Religious school system, where grades cannot serve as a means for comparing progress as tests and quizzes hold no weight, I wondered if the parent really cared whether their child could confidently identify each Hebrew vowel, or whether I was just suppose to tell them how well their child interacted with the others. I pessimistically questioned how possible it was to even measure student progress amidst so many competing theories regarding the purpose of a Jewish-American education. Was it enough that they did as expected and came to class well behaved twice a week, even if, to my dismay, they still could not read a basic Hebrew text?
In the end, I told each parent whether their child followed along during services, how creative they were during our art project segments, and the extent of their participation in our Jewish-ethics sessions. I hoped that these positive remarks would encourage the students to take a more active interest in the subjects we discussed. I wondered, however, what sort of feedback I would receive were teacher evaluations to become an additional requirement. Are we missing out on opportunities for improving the relevance of the provided material by only assessing the student— and not the system? Ultimately, I concluded each individual evaluation on a positive note, cryptically commenting how ‘we looked forward to future progress in the coming semester.’ Whatever, I thought, this may entail.
