Everyone's a Critic

Having spent the past two weeks reading my own student evaluations, as well as those of our faculty, I picked up today's New York Times Magazine with interest to read David Holmberg's "On Language" column commenting on his own experience with student evaluations as a teacher of journalism at NYU and Drew University. He writes, "Sad to say, because Drew is such an exemplary school that in one of my three classes there I experienced the worst psychic injury in my university stint — from words I thought were severely lacking in intellectual openness and self-knowledge" ("Student Evaluations" 18). Not only do Holmberg's reactions and defenses ring true with any teacher who has felt the sting of his or her students' seemingly narrow and unconscious comments, but they also suggest to me the importance of teaching our students what it means to review and evaluate.

Yes, our students evaluate their faculty, but they are also roving critics on the Internet, rating everything from Youtube videos to their friends' comments on Myspace. To do this well, they need to learn the skills of critics -- the discerning eye, the questioning mind, the open perspective -- but they also need to learn how to effectively convey those views to readers, whether their audiences are the subjects of the critiques or it's subject's future viewers or users (a la "product" reviews on Amazon and elsewhere). Our students are just as likely to give rave reviews ("OMG!!!!!!!!") to something they haven't really thought about as they are to denounce something else ("It sucks!") that hasn't tickled their individual funny bones.

There's a responsiblity that goes with reviewing anything, and we have a responsibility to teach it.