I just received my students’ teaching evaluations of me from Spring 2003, and they look pretty good. My evaluations for Fall 2002 were okay, but these are better. Meanwhile, online records indicate that a third of the students signed up for my Fall 2003 eighteenth-century novel class are students who have taken me before. Both of these tid-bits of information feel pretty good.

The classes that I’ve struggled the most with this year (Milton in the fall and Shakespeare in the spring) and worried the most about whether I was teaching well are the ones that received the best evaluations.