The semester is over!

Now begins the mad scramble to get grades in, resolve incompletes, listen to the endless pleas for extensions and extra credit, etc.

The last class is always the last exam. And given that this is the case for all the other classes, students are mostly stressed out, drained, and otherwise mentally checked out during ‘finals week’. The mood on exam day is always one of panic, dread, and doom. But during finals week, it’s a few extra levels of crazy.

This semester was an interesting one. I had a fairly mixed age group of twenty students probably from 18 to 50+ years old from all walks of life. And over the semester I learned about their aspirations, their past, and their present. They all have interesting stories and out of respect for them and their trust in me, I won’t share those stories here. Regardless, I know those stories and I believe them. The students bring their lives to class.

I get to know them through class time. My lectures aren’t ‘lectures’ in the traditional sense, but rather, question and answer sessions. Often times, I ask the questions and they try to answer and eventually, the interaction flips. They begin asking questions and I start answering. But my answers are questions back to them. And so the dance goes.

Through this dance, they reveal little things about their lives — things like, what happened at work, or how many jobs they are working, or what they really want to do, etc. The more information I receive, the more I can begin to tailor certain aspects of the lecture and the course content to their personal stories. And I reveal a few things about myself. I’m learning to play piano. I used to run a Math Department and now I’ve decided to try the entrepreneurial route.

Like I said, this semester was an interesting one. This last exam was also an interesting one. I had sixteen students take the final (I think this is correct and I am too lazy to count the exams sitting next to me, but whatever, I’m sure that number is correct to \(\pm 1\) with fairly high confidence) — the others either had dropped the course or had legitimate reasons for their absence. I’m fairly friendly on exams. Meaning, I don’t mind answering questions or even nudging them in the right direction. But this last exam, was easy. It was practically a duplicate of the exam review and the quiz they had (and the quizzes are take home, open note, open book, work with friends, etc.). I did this on purpose. We only had two lectures to cover the material and this exam was during finals week, whereas in other courses, the last exam is often a cumulative final.

I don’t engage in ‘gotcha’ questions or ask questions that require the use of esoteric methods. The questions are straightforward and they are designed to test the concepts learned at varying levels of depth. Of the sixteen students, four were woefully underprepared.

Of the four, one didn’t know how to use his phone’s calculator, admitted that he hadn’t studied, ran out of battery power on his phone, and then proceeded to spend the remainder of the exam period trying to see if he would pass the course! Another said to me, as he turned in his exam, “If I don’t pass, I’m going to come find you.”. A third went on endlessly about how much he had studied but just blanked. And a fourth was simply too tired. But I know them, this behavior wasn’t too much of a surprise. I can’t save students from themselves — and they know that that’s my stance. I need a minimal acceptable level of effort on their part, otherwise, I may as well just take the course for them.

The other twelve students steadily took the exam and asked a few relevant questions.

And this is where the end of any semester always saddens me a little bit. I just spent four months working with twenty or so people and now that the semester is over, I will probably never see or hear from them again. As students complete their exam and hand them in, they usually say, “Thanks for the semester”, smile, and walk out (except for the one who decided to threaten me). Some, almost always males, will shake my hand as they thank me for the semester. And that’s it, most likely the last meaningful interaction with them.

Well, we have one final interaction. I have to grade the last exam and then post the course grade. They will check their grade frantically every day until they see what they’ve gotten. This is the final bureaucratic interaction to mark the official end of the semester.

I feel like a throw-away professor. Thanks for the semester. You were awesome. See you never. I did this when I was a student. I wonder how my professors felt. I remember the names of many of my professors from undergrad and grad school. Only a few, I would say, have impacted me positively. And this is what I wonder about now, as the semester has ended. I can accept that I’ll never see my students again. But will the last four months have any impact on their lives again?

Maybe it’s arrogant of me to think that I should have any impact on anyone. Who am I anyway? And why should these students care? Do other professors just become numb to it or did they never care to begin with? I can’t imagine it’s universally the latter nor the former.

Over the years, some of my students have kept in touch with me. And it’s nice to see where their lives have gone. I, too, keep in touch with some of my college professors. Just not all of them. So why should I expect any differently?

I know that I have positively influenced some students. This semester, one student declared his major to be Mathematics. Hooray! I also just received a wonderful ‘thank you’ email from another student. I completely cherish those emails. It tells me that the student actually decided to sit down and write something. I haven’t yet looked at the exams, but in the past, at least one or two students writes a thank you message on the exam.

But what of the other students? I hope that I didn’t detract them from Mathematics. In some sense, that’s almost impossible, because by the time they’ve come to me, most of them hate the subject anyway! So I suppose it’s a positive expected value game for me. 🙂

Regardless, the first day of the end of the semester always has me feeling a little sad and like a throw-away professor. But, the next semester is only a few weeks away and I need a little bit of time to decompress from the madness. I wonder if the students think they were just throw-away students to me. Anyway, emo-post over. I need to clean my place. It is filled entirely with too many student papers.

How do you feel when the semester / year ends if you teach? Glad it’s over? or a little saddened? or both? What if you’re a student?