The Form That Won’t See You
A Post-Evaluation Reflection
For anyone who’s ever distilled a year’s worth of invisible labor into a bullet point and wondered if it even mattered.
It’s done. Submitted. Checked off.
Not with pride—more like resignation. Another ritual completed, another hoop jumped.
Most of us fill out some version of this: the annual self-evaluation, performance report, faculty activity review. A document meant to capture what we’ve done, how we’ve grown, how we’ve met the moment. In theory, it’s a mirror—reflecting our work back to those who oversee it. But in practice?
It’s theater.
We write with precision for readers who won’t read. We articulate our value for systems that don’t know how to hold it. We speak in institutional code because saying what’s true too plainly can come across as either arrogant or insubordinate.
We Already Know What We’re Good At
For those of us who live in reflection as part of the work—who revise, recalibrate, and refine as a matter of course—these forms don’t offer insight. They offer performance.
We already know what we’re good at. We know what’s working. We know the moments that mattered.
We also know that few people, if any, will ever see it the way we do. Our evaluations become highlight reels for an audience that isn't watching.
The irony is that some of our most powerful growth happens quietly. In the way we reframe an assignment mid-semester. In the conversation we didn’t have to have with a student because we preemptively clarified the confusion. In the decision to protect our energy, step back from an initiative, or set a boundary that made the work more sustainable.
But those don’t always make the form. And when they do, they’re flattened—glossed over by rubrics that prize metrics over meaning.
What Can’t Be Said (But Still Shapes the Work)
What’s hardest to articulate in these forms isn’t the “what”—it’s the “why.” Why we no longer overextend. Why we stopped chasing committees that don’t follow through. Why we’ve learned to smile politely through invitations that are really obligations.
And then there’s what can’t be said at all.
That the version of “equity” championed in some departments feels more exclusive than inclusive. That showing up with a dissenting perspective—even one offered in good faith—can get you silently sidelined. That some students treat us like punching bags, and the system shrugs.
These truths live between the lines.
We don’t name them. But they shape everything.
The Reckoning
Let’s be clear: teaching professors in my rank in 2025 are paid by the university—a major, Big Ten university—around $42,000 a year. Most of us have—at least—an M.Ed. While I’m “non-tenure line,” my “tenure” has covered 23 years of full-time work.
Penn State’s English faculty are the lowest-paid in the Big Ten, as this Spotlight PA article points out with clarity and context. But you don’t need an exposé to feel it.
The institution reminds me often—implicitly and explicitly—that I should feel grateful. That the salary might be stagnant, but the administration reassures me it is “doing all that it can to increase salaries,” and don’t forget— the benefits package is generous. And to some extent, it is. I’ll carry university-sponsored health insurance into retirement, a rare and valuable offering in today’s workforce.
But it comes at a cost: 25 years of service.
Call it what you like, but it’s hard not to hear the echo of indentured servitude in that equation.
And while I continue to show up—prepared, intentional, committed—I do so in a system that offers limited protection from student behaviors that stretch the bounds of what a single instructor should be expected to manage. I’ve helped students through emotional outbursts, psychological crises, and medical emergencies. Once, before cell phones were ubiquitous, a student had an asthma attack in the middle of class. I calmly cleared the room—protecting her dignity and her classmates from panic—and stayed with her until she could breathe again. Refusing medical treatment but her body clearly weakened from the episode, I carried her to College Avenue, hailed a cab, and rode with her to her dorm, walking her inside to make sure she would be okay.
That kind of care is not rare in teaching. But it is rarely acknowledged. When students unravel—whether emotionally, medically, or otherwise—the person standing in front of the classroom becomes triage, support staff, counselor, advocate. And yet the support we receive in these moments is minimal. If anything, the burden quietly doubles: manage the student, manage the silence of the “inclusive” department that doesn’t want to deal with what inclusion actually requires.
And still—I stay. Not just because I have to, but because I want to. Because alongside the chaos and the contradictions are students who remind me why I began. The ones who tell me, unprompted, that I’ve helped them believe in their own voice. That my feedback helped them take a risk—in their writing, in their major, in their lives. The students who carry my words forward in ways I’ll never see.
They are the reason I can’t dismiss this work entirely. But I can—and must—recalibrate how I show up in it.
This isn’t about giving up. It’s about waking up.
To the cost of being good in a system that undervalues goodness.
To the truth that being excellent doesn’t guarantee recognition—only exhaustion.
To the quiet, steady decision to work from dignity, not desperation.
The Real Record
So we submit the form.
We tick the boxes.
We play the part.
But we also know: the real record isn’t what gets uploaded to the system. It’s what gets remembered—by us, by the people we teach or lead, by those whose lives we touch in ways that don’t fit neatly into a bullet point.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s everything.
Because when the applause never comes, when the promotions stall, when the feedback is just silence wrapped in a smile—we still know.
We are enough. We always have been.
And we don’t need to keep working harder just to prove it.
