How on earth are people with anxiety supposed to write self-evaluation statements? My actual honest self-evaluation would be brutal, but I know that's not what they want. I need to be honest, but also make myself look good, and my brain is not built that way.

ChatGPT, Hil? Use what you’ve used before but remix it? Have a friend/colleague tell you nice things you can put, either about you or that they’ve used?

I mean generally at work I feel like I am absolutely not doing my 100% best…but I also usually feel like my 75% is better than most people are doing anyway (whether that’s their 100 or their 75 or their 25 I don’t know)

We had a wonderful mini vacation, despite the weather not being cooperative. I’m lounging today but feeling more relaxed than I have in ages.

A lot of my evaluations from students are like, "Did you learn a lot? Yes. Was the professor good at explaining the material? Yes. Was the course structured well? Yes. Did the assessments measure what you learned in class? Yes. Were your questions answered promptly? Yes. Did you like the professor? No." And I just don't know how to explain that other than, "I guess they think I have bad vibes or something?"

So now I'm going through each course I taught, and taking notes of "stuff that worked well that students liked" and "stuff that I can see was an issue, and how I'm planning on fixing it in the future," and I'll work from there.

Have a friend/colleague tell you nice things you can put, either about you or that they’ve used?

I did have a colleague observe one of my classes and write a letter that I can include in my portfolio, and he seemed to think I was doing great.

I hate evaluating myself, too.(I'm thinking "so brave!1" did us both some damage. I always heard it on a most-miserable day. It's made it hard to trust myself, and, relatedly feel that other people are, being 100,. Jen,I've tried to accept that even Neighbor Kid wasn't trying to be a dick, but I don't really enjoy picking up his mantel,

I have never been able to write a good thing about myself. College applications were pure hell for me. So, I feel for you, Hil. Honestly the dislike you get on your feedback could be prejudice for disability, not that that would go over well on a review.

Honestly the dislike you get on your feedback could be prejudice for disability, not that that would go over well on a review.

Yeah, I thought of that, or that some of it could be because I wear an N95 for teaching, and they don't like seeing it. But there's no good way to put that into this, so I'm just focusing on all the individual things that they said I did well, and kind of skipping over the "overall, what is your rating of this instructor?" numbers.

That sounds like the way to go. Self-evals are the worst

It may make you feel better to hear that I did some kind of enrichment program one summer in high school (I think) where we took a classes at LSU that weren’t, like, real classes with college students in them but were taught by professors (or adjuncts or whatever, I have no idea, but not TAs or grad students) and one of them told us all that he got really good evaluations from his students but he knew it was just because he was entertaining and not necessarily that they learned all that much from him. I can’t remember what class that even was but him complaining about how they were evaluated even though it was to his benefit really stuck in my head.