Teaching Life

I came across the Rate My Teachers Web site today and I thought it was a creative way to give feedback to teachers or administrators. The site has rules regarding postings that include profanity, name-calling, sexual comments,  discrimination, etc.  These posts will be deleted.  For more serious acts like threats of harm or injury, the comments will be reported to the right authorities. The feedback is only to be provided for teachers or administrators or other people that affect a student’s education.  So, the site is not for staff like secretaries or janitors who work at the school.

I think this is a great way for students to provide feedback anonymously.  No name or e-mail is required to make comments.  Parents can also make comments on the site about the teaching staff.  RateMyTeacher allows students and parents to voice thier opinions in a non-threatening environment. This site can also be helpful to teachers who want constructive feedback in an honest way without knowing who provided the feedback (which could cause bias).

Of course, there will be teachers who see this site as hate mail and inappropriate.  However, with the monitoring of comments, I think it is more useful than the concern of the crushed egos of some of the teachers.  Besides, the site is called “Rate My Teachers”, not “What I Do Not Like About My Teachers.”  There is a great opportunity to provide positive feedback as well!

For students that go to this site, it is important to have useful and productive comments.  A comment like, “my teacher is fat and has no fashion sense” is not only useless, but is against the site’s rules and will get deleted anyway.  So, keep the comments about physical appearance to your friends or journals.