December 4, 2008

Last Day

Today was my last class of the semester. It took two trips to my car to load all of the papers and portfolios I have to grade, but I didn't even mind.

When I taught high school, I was so happy when the end of the year came. Knowing I had an entire summer to be free of certain students was a wonderful feeling. Today I felt kind of sad. I'm going to miss these kids.

Teaching at a University where you are given complete academic freedom is entirely different than teaching high school. The classroom management issues are minimal. The kids are more grown up and they take better responsibility for completing their work. I was given the freedom to teach the way I wanted to and I ran with it.

Today I took pictures of my classes so that I can pull them out and point to them when they're all famous (and also in case I feel like photo-shopping them onto monkey bodies or something, or so I told them). I also let my speech class choose three questions that I would have to create an impromptu speech about. Although some of their topics were inappropriate and therefore ignored (Take "Which one of your students would you go out on a date with and why?" as an example), they came up with ones that made me discuss what my chosen super power would be and a life changing experience. The last topic they asked me was to discuss the best and worst moments in speech class.

I told them that the best far outnumbered the worst and then went around the room and told each one of my students something special about what they did in class. It was truly a special semester and a great group of kids. I hope I'm half as lucky next semester.