(photo by Ted Fines)

I recently briefly referred to a few scathing student evaluations from my students at a local law school.  Surely my wounded feelings (after all that prep time!) were just another instance of my own hyper-sensitivity and after a day of denial,anger,bargain,depression, I accepted that I was not going to be anyone's Ms. Chips. 

When I began speaking to others who taught at the university level, however, everyone I spoke to seemed to have experienced their own wounded feelings at student evaluation time.   

Now to complete my cycle of grieving comes writer and adjunct journalism professor David Holmberg in today's NYT Magazine "On Language" Column, Student Evaluations.

"I began the semester with what I hoped was an illuminating discussion of the digital revolution and its impact on print journalism," says Holmberg.

And throughout the term, as I had done routinely at N.Y.U., I used The Times as an educational tool. I tried very hard to convey the value and enormously important traditions of print, of quality journalism.

But in their evaluations, 4 out of 11 students ignored my efforts and attacked my journalistic and professorial credibility in what was for me an unprecedented fashion. They said I showed a “liberal bias” by using The Times in class (perhaps echoing the political bent of their parents, as the young are wont to do), and two students said — glibly and absurdly in my view — that the class was of no benefit because of my perceived bias. One said bluntly, “I learned nothing from this class.” Another . . . said that “I did not learn anything in this class besides a strong dislike of The N.Y. Times. There was no journalistic background taught.”

Now that David Holmberg has helped me achieve complete acceptance of my semester-end student "grades," I'm freed to wonder whether there is more of a generation gap between those of us who teach after a career in practice (i.e., really old people) and students in their twenties.

At minimum, it would seem a good thing to open the following semester with questions about what the students' hopes and fears about the class are and whether they are as willing to hold themselves responsible for their own educational experience as I am for the guidance of it.