Today I rang my superviser in Darwin to discuss an issue with him. We had a good chat and as I was hanging up he said, “I am sending you the summaries of the student’s evaluations today”. “Are they okay?” I asked all of a sudden feeling unnecessarily nervous. “They’re great” he said, “as far as I can remember only one, maybe two things you may have to note but nothing bad”. I hung up the phone feeling very worried in deed and checked my emails every couple of minutes to see if something had come through. It was ridiculous. I have 32 students, of course there will be one or two comments that I may have to note (in fact it is a good thing) but this does not mean that I am bad teacher or the students hate me or all the other negative things that were going through my head.

I really want to be less concerned about what people think of me. I had this issue a few years back when at course I was attending we were required to write notes to people giving them feedback about themselves. Of the 40 or so lovely notes I got one of them was negative and I totally fell apart. At the time I really worked hard to get over that and made some plans about how I would deal with negativity in the future and now here I was again out of proportinally worried about my students evaluations and feeling like I had gotton nowhere on that.

They came through a little while ago and they were absolutely lovely. While I know that people are always more likely to write good things and thus you can not put everything on these sort of evaluations they were a real boost for me. When asked if they were happy with class everyone single one of them said yes and there were a plethora of lovely comments to go with that. The one or two issues were simply one student who wrote “I like Emily’s teachings but we need more vocabularly” and another who wrote “I am happy to teacher but we need more grammar”.

I am very annoyed with myself and in light of the positivity of these evaluations I feel even sillier for worrying so much. But I guess that is not the point. I need to find a way of dealing with the fact that through life there are going to be people and students who do not like me but that’s normal and okay. I would like to be in a place where if one of them had of wrote “Emily is by far the worst teacher I have ever had and I have not learned a thing this semester” I would still be able to cope. I know I am no where near that.