Have you ever had that one teacher who seems to never teach you anything, but the administration treats them as if they have tenure? They may get off task, read straight from the text, or just genuinely not seem to care about the subject, yet they are always around to “teach” the next batch of students?

No one gets to choose who they learn from. You tend to be stuck with whomever you get for the rest of the year. It seems unfair. Why must your education be hindered by an uncaring teacher? On the other hand, there are always those teachers who don’t get nearly enough recognition that they deserve.  This is something many colleges and universities have seemed to figure out, so they leave it up to the students to keep their teachers honest and hard at work by letting the students grade their teachers at the end of the year.

This is a concept that many may feel high school students are a bit too immature to take seriously, and perhaps to some extent this is true because some students may have an unrelated grudge against a teacher and rate their performance severely low despite the fact that said teacher may be an excellent teacher. Yet this is still no reason to altogether disregard the majority opinion that students may have of their teachers.

Although these opinions should be taken with a grain of salt, they could be used as a rough sketch for the school administration as to what the classroom environment is like on a daily basis. Teachers at OHS do get evaluated by their higher-ups; however, this may not give the full portrayal of how the classroom operates since the teachers and students know to be on their best behaviors and give the lesson their full attention during the evaluation.

Whether most of the student body would take these teacher evaluations seriously or not, the ones who do give meaningful responses could give real insight into a student’s perspective of their teacher’s work ethic compared to other teachers. This insight will benefit the class taught next by teachers as they will know what students feel they do right and what they could improve upon.