Random Thoughts from the End of the Semester

I thought about posting these in separate posts, but it appears that I am too lazy.

General Thoughts About Ending

As usual, the end of the semester is bittersweet for me. The sweet part is that I am absolutely done with grading. I have nothing to grade. Nada. Zip. Bupkis. It's probably been months since I could say that. I also have nothing to prepare, no meetings to attend, and no pesky students to come around asking for help.

The sad part is that I've really come to like those pesky students. As usual, I looked around the room during the final exam and thought about how I have gotten to know most of these students pretty well. I know who tries hard, and who coasts. I know who is good at math and who isn't. I know a lot about their personal lives, including the woman whose boyfriend is seriously ill, and the student who is prone to anxiety attacks. I'll miss them. And next semester, it will be another batch of strangers whom I have to get to know.

Thoughts About the Semester's Courses

I can't say that I'm entirely satisfied with the courses. I don't know that I ever am entirely satisfied, but this semester feels worse than usual. I don't feel like I've acheived the course goals very well. I feel like I was too easy a grader, and too many people got A's who deserved B's, and too many people got C's deserved D's. I feel like I let myself get caught up in the mathematical triviata, and lost some of the sense of fun that this material should carry.

I want to sit down and make some detailed notes for myself about what I think went wrong, and what I want to do next time I teach any of these courses.

Update on The Student Who Got The Talk

He got an A. I'm glad I didn't tell him, "There's no way you're going to get an A, buddy." The final exam was easier than I had planned, and he picked up some cheap points at the end. In some cosmic sense, I still don't believe that he mastered the material at the A level. But, I can't go back and change the rules, or give a harder final. And he is a nice guy, so I'm happy for him.

Update on The Students Who Cheated

I had already talked to the young lady, whom I will call Frederika, and she had confessed. She did it, she was sorry, and she would never, ever, ever do it again. The next day, the young man, whom I will call Octavio, came in and explained that it wasn't his fault. Actually, his girlfriend had sent his paper to Frederika, and he hadn't even found out about it until later. (He didn't say exactly how much later, but he didn't try to make the case that he didn't know that it had happened at all until he heard from me.) And anyway, he thought that Frederika just wanted to look at his paper for ideas, and he didn't know that she would copy it.

If you take all this at face value, he did get kind of the raw end of the deal. If the paper really was already out there before he even knew about it, what exactly could he do? He could have talked to Frederika and told her explicitly not to copy his paper, but that's kind of a hard conversation. He would have to say to her face that he assumes that she is planning to cheat. Or he could have come to me and said, "Hey, my girlfriend sent my paper to Frederika. If her paper looks too much like mine, it's not my fault." However, that would have taken a lot more guts than I would have had at that age. Hell, that would have taken a lot more guts than I have now.

However, I don't see any reason to take all this at face value. Certainly Octavio put the best spin on it he could, even if he didn't outright lie. I'm not sure that I believe that his girlfriend got her hands on his paper without talking to him at all. Even if she had access to his computer, she would have had to ask what the file was called and where he filed it. And I don't believe for an instant that either Octavio or his girlfriend thought that Frederika wasn't planning to copy his paper, although they might have thought that she would try harder to disguise it.

In any case, I gave Octavio and Frederika the same consequence, which was a 0 on the assignment. In a bit of strange kismet, it affected Frederika's grade, but not Octavio's. She got lowered from a C to a D, which likely means taking the course over. He got lowered from a high B to a low B, but his letter grade didn't actually change at all. So the only consequence for him was having a letter placed in his file with my version of the incident.

Oh, and I had asked them to hand in their first three papers, so that I could compare them. The first time Frederika handed hers in, she actually handed in two of her papers, and a paper from one of my students from a previous semester, that she had apparently borrowed. Since I change up the assignments, this wasn't technically cheating, but it doesn't actually help with the impression that she is normally a concientious and independent student, and that this incident was an abberation.