Our last day of classes was yesterday, and I am left only with final exams and paper grading (two sets of term papers, one set of short papers, five 60+ senior theses, and two sets of final exams). On Thursday as I left the building my office is in to go to a reception for a senior interdisciplinary major I was hit by the end of semester wave.
When I was an undergrad and had turned in my last paper or final of the semester (and most significantly, for the year) I would regularly have a particular sort of feeling wash over me. It was like the weight of the year was lifting up from my shoulders and my back. Really, it felt like a physical relief. That was a wonderful feeling.
The end of the semester wave I felt on Thursday was different. For one thing I didn't feel it in my shoulders and back, but in my knees. It was more a wobbliness. Am I feeling more nervous, uncertain, now than I have been all semester? Or was it simply a blood pressure thing?
As I get set to grade, grade, grade, I want to take a few minutes to talk about what the end of the semester and an academic career (as in graduation!) can mean for a teacher and a student.
For a tenured professor or teacher, or someone on another sort of continuing position, the end of the academic year provides a break from what has gone before, but not really the end of anything. This past week, while I was meeting with students who wanted to know how well they were doing in the class (can I raise my grade to X?), I was collecting potential textbooks for a new class I am teaching next spring, raising the cap on my larger lecture classes for the fall to offset the numbers in a junior-level class on Islamic material that has less than half the students in it that it really needs to "make," and arranging for student workers in a lab-type setting that I oversee. So it may be that which has taken away the sense of freedom I felt at the end of the semesters when I was an undergrad. Or it may be that I will feel it sometime in the future when the grading is done? That would make me happy. But I don't think it will happen. I can feel my mind shifting ahead to the summer research project and other things I have to worry about in the summer. And the fall, in which I will be adjusting some assignments to reflect that I have 50 students in a section rather than 30-35. It isn't a break, and it isn't the great relief that I felt when finishing the academic year when I was a student.
But for my students, their summers stretch ahead of them filled with potential. New jobs, new places, and new friends. Three are applying for a great internship at the St Louis Art Museum, another is waiting to hear about an internship at the UN, and one is heading off for the Middle East for a study abroad trip. All are really excited about the adventures that are in their immediate future. Some are heading into work and aren't quite as thrilled with the idea that they have to work full time, or are overwhelmingly relieved that they don't have to come to class (or feel guilty-ish that they don't come to class), but those are the ones who usually choose not to come and talk to me about their summer plans. And they are the ones for whom I have not written letters of recommendation and thus I don't know their specific plans.
I am looking forward to the summer, even without this wave of combined relief and anticipation. I like summer in my small town -- the farmers' market, the socializing, the nights out watching meteor showers from a boat in the lake. But I am even more looking forward to the past semester being over. From having started so well, it has been frustrating at the end. One of my classes has had a very serious attendance problem. They are doing presentations this month, and all of them should theoretically be interested in what the class is covering, but there are a couple of them who have only shown up for their own presentation day. The average attendance is only about 2/3ds of the class. I realize some people, even those who participate in the discussion of this series, feel that it is up to the instructor to provide incentive for students to come to class -- if it is interesting, they claim, the students will come. But this isn't me that they are dissing; it is their fellow students. I don't give specific points for attending class, but class participation (which includes attendance, and asking questions, as well as the normal doing the readings, participating in class discussion, and helping to edit each others' papers) is more than ten percent of the final mark and missing a whole month of class cannot but impact the final grade someone gets in the class. I don't understand why you would throw away that in the last month when simply attending and paying attention to presentations is the only in-class task. Earlier in the semester there was reading and I would ask questions and call on them randomly. They had to be prepared. But now, not so much. Why would you choose to not show up now? I have had other frustrations with other classes -- misunderstanding of assignments I have used in the past with no problems, repeated submissions where earlier-noted mistakes have not been corrected, and so on. But the attendance issue has been confusing me a bit. I will have to re-examine this, but it will have to be after the semester is over. Right now I just have to make it through this first.