Semester's End (a teacher's perspective)

I love the end of the semester. I love solidifying grades, the excitement of students, the final results of projects and papers, seeing what they've managed to remember, reading their favorite/least favorite topics of the semester, and playing review games. I do not love the grabbing for extra credit, the last minute "Oh, my doctor gave me a note for that day I missed class back in September" attempts, and I really don't like giving bad grades to good people who just didn't do it. I also don't like cheaters. But really, the end of a semester is fun.

It should be noted that poor grammar here is different than poor grammar I've experienced anywhere else. Things like, "I knoe it was wrong," "It isn't fare," and "Everyone has went there before" are typical, and people really do use the word "ain't" regularly. They don't really say "y'all" but there are lots of "you uns" instead. They also say, "I don't care to," which really means "I don't mind." It throws me off. If I ask someone to turn off the lights, they'll say, "I don't care to," and then I think, "Geez, I mean, it's just the lights, but if you don't want to..." but they're up and turning them off. They'll say on their review papers, "I didn't care to learn this chapter," but it really means they didn't think that the chapter was so bad. It throws me for a loop every time. I get even more confused when people use it as a question: "If you don't care to close the door...?" I never know what to say. Yes? No? Much of my classroom confusion this semester came from this.

And now for the semester highlights!

We did some fun stuff in class this semester. I had my anatomy class recreate bones and bony structures with candy, which was very fun. They completed it with varying degrees of success. Here are two of my favorites, both of which feature a foot.
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My biology lab class was supposed to do a science fair type project this semester. It was pretty basic - it had to be biology and not chemistry or physics, they had to do a formal lab report on it (they've been doing those all semester), they had all four months to do it, and they had to do a basic one minute presentation on it the last day of class. This was worth 25% of their grade. The last day of class rolls around, and fully half of my class doesn't show up. Of those who actually were there, here are the best moments:

• One person came who didn't do it. He pretended he did, and gave a fake presentation on what he pretended to have done. He told us about watering plants with tap water, boiling water, and frozen water. (Did he just put ice cubes on it? And wasn't the boiling water also tap water, only hotter?) Apparently, the tap water pretend plants (of unspecified temperature) did the best. (You think?)
• One person decided to go without sleep for as long as she could. Her title was "102 Hours Without Sleep." Her hypothesis was that if she didn't sleep she would experience sleep deprivation symptoms (which she did indeed experience; her formal lab report was simply a journal of her doings and symptoms for those days). Despite the utter lack of the scientific method in her project, her presentation was by far the most interesting. She got pulled over once during these 102 hours, but it turns out she had hallucinated the cop car and only thought she was being pulled over. "Looking back, I probably shouldn't have been driving."
• I loved this title: "Christmas Cactus: Which soil will bring more cheer to your holidays?"
• They struggled with the concept of background information, and researching their projects and past data on them. "Background - I was wondering what would happen." "Background Info - I looked this project up on google to find how to do it and found it in a kid science site." "Background - my girlfriend and her mother were fighting over this so we did an experiment." 
• Instead of "clean up," someone wrote this as their final step in the experiment: "Put all the materials back to their homes."
• Someone used an entire page (a whole page!) to list their three materials and four steps of their experiment, all neatly centered in the absolute middle of the page. This was in the middle of their rather wordy lab report - an almost blank page, just sitting there.
• Someone cited me as a source: "Professor. In class. October 2015."
• We learned all sorts of things: freezing bananas makes their skins darker, some types of bread never mold, painted toes may or may not grow faster, and in a how-long-does-it-take-for-this-to-dissolve experiment, "sometime in the nine and a half hours I was away, the substance dissolved."

Here's to education!