I underwent my first faculty evaluation for an online class last year. We’re evaluated by our department chair every four years; my last eval was pre-pandemic when I was mainly teaching in a live classroom. These evaluations, on ground or online, include an anonymous student survey on their take on my performance.
It’s easier for me in a live classroom where I can gauge the students’ reactions to me in real time. I can pretty much predict how they will describe my performance. Online, I’m blind. So, it was with a frisson of trepidation that I read over the survey comments.
The written comments are optional, which means they are usually left by students who either love you or hate you. The latter category of comments included a disparaging description of me as “woke.”
Woke is a funny choice of a snarl word, since it never really caught on among liberals and progressives. The only occasion I remember using it in the classroom was a few years ago. I had slept poorly the night before, and that day’s talk was not one of my best. After a couple of stumbles, I paused and apologized and told them why. I facetiously remarked that I should be more woke.
No, woke the way it’s used by conservatives is just part of their funhouse mirror vision of how they think people to their left are. In the case of the critical student, he (it was probably a he) meant that I had failed to cater to his prejudices. Concerning the course, there is really very little ideological content. If my material has a flaw, it is that it is maybe a little more rah-rah about the status quo than I actually feel about it. If it is woke in this student’s estimation, it’s likely it’s because I acknowledge the existence of non-whites, that we took our land from its indigenous occupants, that slavery and Jim Crow actually happened, that police violence is visited most often on Blacks and other people of color, that LGBTQ people have rights, and so forth.
It is disconcerting for me the way each of us lives within our own media-driven ideological bubbles. I grew up in an era where there were only three television networks (four if you counted PBS), most moderately large cities had at least two daily newspapers, AM talk radio was fringe, and the internet was in the future. There was already a deepening rift between left and right, but there weren’t cable news and social media to channel extremist ideas unrooted in fact. I am sure that the present climate of mutual mistrust explains the distaste for my classroom statements among some of my distance learning students, and that the quasi-anonymous online environment where teacher and student will never meet personally emboldens them to proclaim their beliefs with little concern for their potential offensiveness. Pity.
©
2023 The Unassuming Scholar
