Finals Week

A friend of mine from my h.s. years stumbled across my blog recently. Actually, it is mainly as an adult that I have thought of her as a friend because when I was in high school, she and her husband served as youth leaders for our church group. So they were always people that I looked up to, kind of like teachers that you admire but know that you are not exactly “friends” with, if that makes any sense.

She actually ran across my former blog while doing a Google search, and she ended up reading this post about her and her husband and their kids. She e-mailed me, afterwards, and caught me up on what is going on in their lives, and asked me what I was up to. I replied, talking about my work situation over the past year, and how the changes at the news office had required me to quit teaching, and how I really did not miss teaching, at all.

And then, yesterday, for a minute or two, I did miss teaching.

This is finals week at the community college where I taught for several years, so I could easily remember the feelings I experienced at that time of the year and imagine what I would be feeling if I were still teaching.

When I began teaching Developmental English, I had to give a department-wide comprehensive 12-page final exam. Yes, that is correct:

a 12-page final exam

Which, no matter how much your department head tries to justify having a 12-page final exam, is still about 7 pages too long. To take OR to grade. And I would omit sections and alter the instructions and even have them tear off the last page, crumple it into a ball and toss it in the trash, but still! What a pain in the ass!

So I would give the final exam to the students in my 3 classes (usually a total of about 50 students) and then spend the next day grading all of the tests. And the grades on the final exam were never as good as I had hoped, and I would start to take it personally until I heard how low the scores were in the other classes, too, and then I would just want to get the damn things FINISHED!

And once I did: I still had to figure up averages ... which also required the grading of all the last-minute papers and what-not that would inevitably come drifting in.

So there was always this 2- or 3-day flurry of activity during finals week, and during that time, I sometimes felt as if I might go a lil’ crazy. ’Cause in the midst of all this, winter sports were also in full swing, so I would meet myself coming and going from one job to the next.

Always a paper to read and grade, always a game to cover, never enough time to sleep.

And, always, several of my students would fail the class. Most of them failed because they didn’t bother to come to class or do the work; in fact, I liked to tell my students that if they attended class and did all of the work and got in their lab hours, they would pass the course. And for the most part, that was true, unless a student really, really couldn’t write, in which case, they would fail because their grades/skills just weren’t good enough in order for them to advance to the next level.

I am amused by the notion of an instructor “giving” a student a grade.

“Are you going to give me an A?” at least one student would ask, after almost every assignment.
“I’m not going to ‘give’ you anything,” I would reply, in my sternest possible voice.

True, assessing student writing does include some subjectivity, and each instructor has her own ideas on what is essential to/for good writing. Does “good writing” consist of a well-developed essay that is filled with grammatical errors? Can a perfectly punctuated paper be any good if it really does not say anything? There is a balance, and many of my students had major problems with grammar AND content.

(AND following instructions ... but that is a whole ’nother topic.)

Still, my students received the grades they earned. No more, no less. Unless, of course, they were within a couple hundredths of a point of getting the next higher grade, and they had come to class regularly and participated and turned in all of their work. In those instances, yeah, I gave ’em an extra .01 or so.

And if they hadn’t ... well, then, see ya next semester.

: )

Anyway, do I miss teaching?

I miss that moment during finals week when I had finished all the grading, tallied up the grades for the course, filled in my grade book, completed all the paperwork and turned in everything to my department chairman. Right after that, I would leave the North Oasis and cut through the library, and when I opened the door to head to my car in the parking lot, and the cold December air (or a hot May breeze) would hit me in the face, and relief would fill my mind:

Then. I miss that moment.

(Though I experience it, to a much lesser but no less appreciated amount, when I leave the news office for a week’s vacation, which, God willing, I will be doing no less than TWICE over the next three weeks!)

And, yeah, I also miss that occasional moment when a student who was on the brink of failing suddenly figured out that he or she really could write, despite anything any elementary teacher had said to him or her, to the contrary, years and years before.

: )

I always meant to post this album cover somewhere in The Freewheelin’ Di Winson but never managed to.



I love this shot. And not just because it’s included in Vanilla Sky, but that’s part of it.

: )