July 28, 2000

Content, Not Style, Counts in Teaching

To the Editor:

In "Some Colleges Pay Students to Go to Class -- to Evaluate Teaching" (June 23), the importance of teaching is again diminished by those who speak most enthusiastically about its importance. To be clear, I am not opposed to teaching evaluations, despite their frequent misuse and misapplication to performance evaluation. This is probably no more distorted than the evaluation of research, which rarely involves reading what is written or asking