RateMyProfessors and Providence

Curses. Blessings.

Thursday night gave me both.

Here’s the odd thing: I received a blessing BECAUSE of a curse.

It was late Thursday, and I have no idea why, but I decided to check out my RateMyProfessors page.

Oh, no.

OH, NO.

You know where this is going, right?

When I went to my page, I found this entry: “Dr. Sircy never clarifies what exactly he wants for his papers. He’s really picky when it comes to those papers. I would not get him again probably the worst teacher and class that I’ve ever taken. I was bored I was not interested he didn’t make it interesting and I wanted to literally slammed  [sic] my head into the desk every single day.”

For real! Read that again. For. Real.

(Two lessons, here.

  1. You can’t please ‘em all!
  2. If you’ve ever felt like slamming your head against a deck during my class, you’re not alone! Others feel the same way!)

Well, I felt like I had been punched in the solar plexus, and for a second, I wondered what I could do.

Could I respond? If I became a member of RateMyProfessors, would they let me apologize to the reviewer, and at least show that I cared that my class had been such an awful experience for the student?

So I signed up. (Yes, RateMyProfessors let’s professors sign up!)

But they need to make sure you’re a professor. They promised me an e-mail, but when I went to my inbox, there was nothing.

So I clicked on my junk-mail folder, a part of my account I NEVER check.

And this is what I found: a message titled “Hello!” from a student I taught here at CSU for three different classes. The message was dated November 15, over four months ago. I wondered if it was spam, but I took a chance and clicked it.

It wasn’t spam at all. It was a message from the student saying she had seen something about Gloucester, England on Facebook and thought of reading King Lear in one of my classes. Her and her boyfriend (who had met in one of my classes!) had left CSU in the spring and were now taking classes in Georgia. She sent me well-wishes and said she was sad she couldn’t take her upcoming literature class with me.

In short: what an amazing blessing!

And this all happened in the span of about twenty-five minutes: me finding the student review that ripped me to shreds and me finding an e-mail from a student who hadn’t had me in over a year about her fond memories of my class.

And here’s the thing. I would not have found that second student’s e-mail had I not read that harsh review! I mean, the message had been in my junk-mail since November. I obviously never check that folder. I just happened to last night because of a random event.

And I thought about each of you, and I want to assure you of three things.

  1. I care about you, and I care specifically about you learning something from my class.  Sometimes I fail in that effort, but I do not take that failure lightly.
  2. Don’t give up on reading and writing just because of my class. I would be happy to hear about anything that you’re excited about reading/writing, even if it’s not what I assign you.
  3. Good things can come out of bad things. Christians call this providence, God’s masterful work in what look like dead-end circumstances.