Self-Evaluation

Years ago I taught physics and Latin at a three-week summer academic program. The fluffy bunny education professor in charge of the faculty attempted to mandate all sorts of her pet philosophies. One of them was the student self-evaluation. The idea was, students should take ownership of their own learning. Through the process of deep reflection and then careful writing about their own strengths and weaknesses, they become better receptive and more responsive to the teacher’s evaluation.[1] This professor even had evidence that requiring self-evaluations was beneficial.[2]

I rebelled.[3] I mean, forget about the fact that not one teacher took the self-evaluation exercise seriously, or that it’s a worthless endeavor anyway unless the students truly wrack the depths of their souls to discover and share their innermost vulnerabilities with the person who assigns grades. Sure, if I were teaching a creative writing course, self- and peer- evaluations might be worthwhile. But in physics? You either know it or you don’t. What good does it do for a student to write an essay that boils down to “I understand kinematics pretty well, but I’m struggling with electric fields,” when he just took a test on which he did well on the kinematics questions and struggled with the electric fields questions? And if it does do some marginal good for the student to acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses in writing, that good is offset by the time it takes for him to write and for me to grade the assignment – we could have spent that time actually addressing his difficulty with electric fields! And I won’t even get into the issue of an educational administrator mandating teaching methods rather than letting presumed professionals do things the way that works for them. (Can you imagine if the baseball players’ union had mandated that Dan Quisenberry stop using his signature sidearm delivery, effectiveness be danged, because that’s not how players are supposed to pitch?)

Okay. Now my rant is over. Ahem. I decided to, um, write a self-evaluation of my progress at Umpire School. Not required or even suggested by the staff, just a useful exercise. For me, in this case. Yeah. I want to see how my own thoughts jibe with what I will hear on Tuesday night at my formal evaluation.

Strengths:

(1) I know the rules backwards and forwards, and I can explain and enforce them.
(2) I’m loud, and (when I’m comfortable) I have a strong field presence.

Other students regularly ask me about rules situations, because they know that I know what I’m talking about. I’ve never misapplied a rule on the field. And I’m the second-loudest student at the school, to the point where I’ve been the butt of several jokes.[4]

Weaknesses:

(1) The timing of my calls is still too quick.
(2) Though I know my responsibilities, in fulfilling them I often don’t react quickly enough.
(3) Unusual situations puncture my strong field presence.

All three of these weaknesses boil down to, “I need game experience.” Meaning:

TIMING: Way too often I see something happen, and then render an immediate decision. That’s good, right? Wrong. I’ve been burned several times by making a call before I’ve seen everything, or before my brain has processed what it saw. For example, I was the base umpire on a fly ball to center field. I knew in this particular drill that I would be asked whether the runners on first and second base tagged up legally after the catch. So, I signaled for the catch, and quickly turned to look at both bases. Both runners tagged up properly. When I looked back to find the ball in center field, it was on the ground. Oops! “NO CATCH! NO CATCH! I frantically waved… an umpire whose timing is good would not have made that catch call, even on a routine fly out, for two or three more seconds. I have to learn to slow down.

REACTIONS: Though my brain knows my responsibilities and positioning, my body doesn’t. Too often the body takes off one way, and the brain has to make a correction. For example, as the base umpire on Saturday, my legs read a ground ball, so they started to move off the line to get in position for the play at first base. Then – only half a second later, but still too late – my brain reminded my legs that if the grounder is to the right side, I’m supposed to wait for it to be fielded before I move. The same kind of thing frequently happens to me as a plate umpire: my legs might keep me camped out by home plate until the brain tells them to get their butt down to third base because a play there would be my responsibility.

Have you ever watched kids learning to play baseball for the first time? Often you’ll see someone who is a good athlete, but who doesn’t know the game yet: the infielder who has to think for a moment before deciding which base to throw to, the baserunner who stops and stares for a moment before he knows whether or not to tag up on a fly ball… well, that’s me as an umpire. Once I can react quickly to plays without thinking about them, I’ll be pretty danged good. But I need game experience, and lots of it, so my movements become routine and instinctive.

UNUSUAL SITUATIONS: Two or three times I’ve been flummoxed on the field by something that wasn’t supposed to happen, but did. One more strange thing happened on Friday when the instructor was evaluating my pitch calling in the batting cage. For this drill, a “batter” dons a helmet and hoists a whiffle bat. He’s never supposed to try to hit the ball, but he’s supposed to give occasional full and check swings so that the umpire can show that he knows what to do. Well, on the second-to-last pitch, the batter made almost a full swing, I saw the ball miss the catcher’s glove… and I was pushed backwards by a thump. The ball hit me. It didn’t hurt – I was, of course, wearing a high quality chest protector – but I couldn’t think for a moment. I wasn’t mentally prepared for a foul ball in the batting cage! I made the wrong signal (I should have called “foul ball”) and looked momentarily meek. (On the final pitch, I gave the emphatic and dramatic “strike three” call with extra fist pumps, which we were not supposed to do, but I did anyway.)

The point is, something strange happened, and I lost my field presence – I “broke character,” if you will. I suppose my reactions have been developed poorly by teaching for twelve years. I’m not afraid of looking weak momentarily in my classroom, because everyone knows that I’m in charge and that I know what I’m doing; if I need a few minutes or a day to decide a knotty, unusual problem, or if I truly was thrown for a loop by an incident, I do better by acting genuinely meek than disingenuously bold. Not so for an umpire, though.

Now, for all of you smart-arses who might want to use these self-criticisms as ammunition when you have a chance to heckle me on the field, recognize that I’m aware of my weaknesses, and I’m working to improve them. I will be better by the time you watch me. My strong suspicion is that, had I been eligible, I would not have progressed this year to the minor leagues. However, I think that with a full summer of work, say, in an independent league, I could have come back to be one of the top students NEXT year.

I won’t be asking for another sabbatical next year, though. Sigh.

[1] I think she must have also used the terms “actualize” and “paradigm” in there somewhere.
[2] The evidence was, she got herself a stack of paper to read that justified her salary.
[3] “You don’t say!?!” is the sarcastic response of those who know the Nachoman personally.
[4] “You don’t say!?!” is the sarcastic response of those who know the Nachoman personally.