Finals Week

It has now come down to final exam week for the fall semester.  I do not know why, but I am always anxious at this time of year.  Perhaps it is because I was so anal about my grades when I was a student and would not settle for anything less than an A.  Perhaps it is because I have almost 400 grades to enter into the grading system this semester for the students taking the five classes I taught and am worried I will give one or more of them an incorrect final grade -- which then involves paperwork to correct it.  There may be more reasons for my anxiety that could be explained by Freud, Watson, or Jung but since our health care no longer covers counselling we will never know.

So to all of you, anxious or not, I hope you all had a successful quarter or semester.  I also hope you will join me in looking back upon your classes and use the necessary tools to diagnose whether or not the students got value for their tuition dollar.  It is not enough to just wrap up and move on to the next class of students; it is imperative that we look back and ask ourselves whether we did the best job possible so that our students learned all that they needed to learn from us to continue down the education path or did we let them down?  Were the exams fair?  Did we use the appropriate teaching methods to accomplish course objectives?  Were students allowed to stay in their comfort zone or did we press them to learn new and different things with fresh perspectives?  There are hundreds of other questions to be asked and answered but unless we attend to some of them we will not really know for sure whether teaching for learning has taken place under our watch.