OPINION: Students Need Teacher Progress Reports
Students should grade teachers, just like they grade us.
Observation and Communication
When the school year ends, many teachers and professors ask their students to rate their performance so they can improve the next year. Often, they pass out sheets filled with particular categories students can evaluate them based upon.
I commend teachers who do this for taking the initiative in improving themselves for their students. However, there are some teachers and professors in academia who were never meant to educate the next generation. It is not because they are not smart — some teachers and professors are geniuses, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be teaching.
If teachers are not looking out for student opinions, students have created message boards and websites like Rate My Professor for their own information. These resources let students rate their teachers to help future students in choosing their classes. Beyond that, students are always talking to other students, sometimes complimenting and sometimes complaining about their teachers.
Some teachers and professors are geniuses, but that doesn’t mean they should be teaching.
While communication helps students stay informed about teachers who might not be a good fit for them, students can still end up placed into such classes regardless, due to available seats, scheduling limitations, or a variety of other reasons.
Bad Classes Can Still be Unavoidable
Often, the wrong teacher can be detrimental to a student’s future, leaving them unknowledgeable in subjects vastly important to their future like mathematics and English. If you can’t do basic algebra or write a decent paper, who would want to hire you? Of course, some might argue that you don’t need these skills for fast food or retail, but do people really want to work in these fields their entire life?
If you can’t do basic algebra or write a decent paper, who would want to hire you?
Regardless of a teacher’s reputation, often schools will hold onto these teachers due to a lack of staff, but is this truly in a student’s best interest? Should school districts and their schools settle for less for their students? The easy answer to this is no, but the real question is how can we fix this?
The long-term resolution to this problem is to make teaching a more appealing option for talented people entering the work force, with bigger paychecks and better education programs for teachers-in-training. However, we also need a short term resolution for our current moment.
A Step in the Right Direction
One short-term solution is to ensure that each and every teacher is being reviewed by students, in a review system instituted by the school itself. This means that not only will teachers have access to these reviews but school administrators as well.
With this type of review, administrators can find and help teachers who are receiving poor reviews, not only helping teachers prepare their students for the future, but also providing students a better education in the short- and long-term.
Education is the pursuit of knowledge to better pursue one’s own future goals, and a teacher should never be the reason a student gets any less.
Abigail Aubuchon is a senior at YVHS and a member of the Class of 2022. She plays tennis for the varsity team.
