Regular classes ended yesterday. It's a relief to have survived another semester, even though this was (by far) not such a rough one for me. Everyone has been pretty tired lately; I spent the whole month of November feeling like I was running flat out and couldn't sleep enough at night. Thanksgiving Break was just a week ago and it already feels like ancient history.
Anyway, I taught the last General Chemistry classes yesterday. It was unsatisfactory because almost none of the students were paying attention. They are good people, but they are also exhausted. Also I had the last quiz at the end of class so that reduced the time available for content, as it always does on Fridays. Our semester is two days shorter this year and I really missed those days. It meant I was still introducing new content yesterday instead of finishing the class with the YouTube videos about amazing materials like I've done the past ten or so years. The content is my favorite stuff - crystalline solids - which is why I didn't just chuck it out, but I doubt any of the students appreciated it.
After that I went to the last Quantitative Analysis lab. No lab work, just cleaning up and checking out, and I only had two students in the class this fall. It was pretty calm, in contrast to some of the past years I remember. They turned in lab reports and lab notebooks and we were done by about 5:30. I had time to eat a snack and sit quietly in my office for a few minutes before I went to the General Chemistry review session.
Every year I offer this review session and it's usually on the last Friday night, which I know is a tough time for students, but that's how it usually works out because of my schedule. I had eight students come and they had a bunch of questions. I said I would stay an hour or until they ran out of questions, and we were there almost two hours. When they ran out of content, I got questions about my graduate school days and where I went to undergrad and stuff like that. That was nice; our students are generally nice people.
Today I was in my office all day (although I slept later than normal just because it was so comfortable to be in the warm bed with no urgent responsibilities). I graded the small stack of lab reports and the general chemistry quiz, and I got the CourseConnect grades updated. I took several short breaks to work on the Math Advent Calendar, and surprised myself by solving three puzzles. I still haven't figured out the one I was stuck on Thursday, and there's no guarantee that my three solutions are even correct (my puzzle partner J was off-line today), but I feel happier that maybe I'm not completely dumb, after all.
Next week is final exams. I have three, so that's six hours of sitting quietly in classrooms with students. I usually read books during exams, since I have difficulty knitting while watching exams, and I can't just do nothing. All of my exams are standardized and machine-graded, so that doesn't add much to my work. The senior research proposals are another story. I looked at them today: one is 19 pages long and the other is 29 pages, so they will take a while to read and score.
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