It has always seemed to me to be the worst way to end a semester: final exams. You start out by taking a perfectly fine class full of (mostly) perfectly fine students (hey, you know who you are) and then we gang up on them. After working all semester to create esprit de corps, cooperative work habits, and something approaching fun, the instructors all launch into full-scale clobbering mode. Yep, one or two cumulative exams a day for a week ought to do it. Three exams in one day is not allowed. That would be piling on.
Does it leave a bad taste in the students’ psyches? I don’t particularly look back at final exams from my student days with distaste toward my professors. I remember thinking that they were just doing their jobs. But now that I’m the one “just doin’ my job, ma’am,” I feel so bad about it. Does it have to be this way? Couldn’t we instead have a final party? Nope. Instead, we create a class memory moment wrought from exhaustion, discomfort, worry, and just plain wanting it be over. Maybe they are so exhausted that they don’t remember it at all? Can’t say that I remember any of my final exams.
But then again, maybe the final exam is a way to signal that the relationship is over and they can turn away from us and move on. A formal way of shoving the fledglings out of our nests and into somebody else’s bigger and more sophisticated nests. Where they will strengthen their wings and learn some new moves.
But still – the tradition is a bit rough on the students. And on the instructors who grow fond of their fledglings. See ya ’round, chemists.
No comments:
Post a Comment