In which distorted thinking is examined

One of my three jobs is teaching a Library Science class at a nearby university. Every year, the students are able to submit course evaluations towards the end of the class. The instructor receives the results of those evaluations months and months later.

Monday, I received a printout of the evaluation responses from last spring's class. It had rows for the questions: 1 - 11. Just the numbers. It had columns for the answers: A-E. Just the letters. The sheet explaining what the questions were and how the rating scale was set up was not included. All of the responses I got, however, were D's and E's. I immediately assumed that the A thru E responses were like grades, with A being the highest and E being failing (i believe this campus uses E's instead of F's).

So, for about an hour on Monday I was kind of flipping out. I thought, "Dammit I work so hard on that class, this class seemed positive and responsive to my instruction style, I am *not* doing this again even if they ask me, which they won't because I got D's and E's..." etc.


I recognized what I was doing. I was immediatley going into "I suck" mode based on a guess of what the answers meant. I soon saw that I was getting ahead of myself --I needed to see the evaluation questions before I knew the characteristics of the evaluations; but I wasn't able to stop the monkey chatter in my head.

Program teaches me not to sit in an isolated pool of worry and self doubt. Instead, we are to reach out, ask for help, and extend help to others. I called my friend who works at the University who is also an OA. She is an administrator, but she knows the drill. She gave me feedback that those evaluation forms don't usually come back all unsatisfactory. They come back with responses either all over the map (polarized) or all consistently good or pretty good. Last summer when I taught, I got one of those polarized evaluations. When I was done venting, she shared some of the b.s. that she is dealing with in her life. I gave her my perspective. She too was in "i suck" mode. We were able to support each other and mollify each other's anxieties.
Asked for help? Check. Extended help to others? Check. HP speaking to me through my administrator friend? Check. HP showing me I am not a complete fuckup by being able to offer her advice as well? Check.

Finally, today, I received the questions. The answers were a scale with "A" being "Strongly Disagree" and "E" being "Strongly Agree" . The questiosn were all things you would want people to agree with, like: "Professor is consistently prepared for class." "Professor has command of the subject matter." So my students (granted, only 5 students), all either agreed or strongly agreed with positive comments about my instruction capabilities.

Today I ask HP to help me recognize my thinking that is a distorted self image manifesting itself, and run those distortions by others to gain outside perspective.