Anticlimactic Semester End
Classes ended this semester on a Tuesday. That’s unusual, and it helped create one of the most anticlimactic ending to a school semester ever! There’s something thrilling, for me anyway, in ending the semester with a bevy of final papers and exams. Believe it or not, I like sitting for final exams. You spend lots of time preparing and then, usually, come out feeling on top of the world. Especially for my favorite type of exams – essay exams on literature – finals are an exciting time. You feel like you pour out all your knowledge into that blue book (or two or three blue books). It helps that final exams were generally rewarding to me.
This semester (grad semesters in general, I guess) had a bit of a disappointing end. First, I had a take-home statistics exam, which usually would have meant a good start to finals week. But it ended up being due on the last day of class. Once that was completed, I had nothing due until today. An entire week to do nothing but work on a final paper and a revision to a project. I worked on the paper Wednesday through Sunday, then finished up the project revision. I turned both in yesterday.
Grading is not a rewarding end of semester activity, and that’s all I have left to do. 13 groups papers and 47 individual papers. There’s less variability for grades as points build up. Students will have earned a possible 360 points before I grade their 40 point paper. This means for some students the paper won’t be able to change their grade. It can make grading go a little faster, but doesn’t add any sense of accomplishment to completing the semester. Ah well, I’d better get used to it. I won’t have too many semesters of classes remaining anyway. My days as a student may meet an equally anticlimactic ending.
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