The serpentine curve of teaching

My feelings about the course I'm teaching -- and the students in my course -- tend to vary by where in the semester we are. If you plotted "time" on the horizontal axis, and my feelings on the vertical axis, it would look fairly serpentine.

At the beginning of the term, I'm all excited to meet the students and lay some knowledge on 'em. Everything is fresh and new.

By about the three-fourths point, both the instructor and the students are a bit "over it"; it's a drag, assignments and responsibilities are starting to pile up, and we just want it to be over.

Then, in the final week of classes, I get a bit misty-eyed: all these [mostly]-great people, whom I'll likely never see again...

And then, a week or two later, we have the final exam, and I get to do all the grading, enter their scores into the spreadsheet, and calculate the final grades.

Yay.


And then the next semester approaches, and the cycle repeats.


--GG