I wrote earlier about my plan for the final presentations. I handed small pieces of scratch paper out to my students, and I tasked them with writing down the things the presenter did well, and any questions they had. I was already pleased with the results.

How could I not be pleased when they had questions to ask at the end of presentations? They had plenty of nice things to say to the presenters. It was easy to get the conversation started.

This is what one student wrote in his a final portfolio letter to me about what he learned in the class:

My favorite moment from the semester came after my Final Project presentation. … After my presentation, I was really down on myself. I got very nervous while presenting, missed points that I wanted to make, failed to answer questions that I knew the answer to, and on top of this I had gotten very little sleep the night before. When I got back to my seat, the little slips of paper were sitting there. Reading them absolutely turned my day around. While I cannot pinpoint an exact lesson I learned here, I can tell you that I really appreciate all of the effort you took to make this class a positive and enjoyable environment for everyone. I learned that a professor that really cares about creating a welcoming environment can make all the difference.

Am I ever glad I ran that experiment.

The beginning of finals week is always a period of great unhappiness and stress.

Students look at their grades, seemingly for the first time, and ask instructors to magically save them from the consequences of prior inaction.

Instructors are trying to juggle getting exams prepared with answering last minute questions from students.

Instructors pay for every little delay they’ve made in preparing their grade book.

Departmental administration and college-level administration have to deal with the onslaught of complaints from students about their unfair instructors who are not magically saving them from the consequences of prior inaction. Scheduling stress too, as projections for the fall entering class come in. Sometimes that stress trickles down in, say, my direction.

Not that I should complain too much. I am relatively well-off this end-of-the-semester. I don’t give a final. My students hand in a final portfolio, so yes, I will have some writing to grade, but the portfolio description has been prepared since the beginning of the semester; I didn’t have to write that this week. It isn’t like my students need a lot of help in preparing a final portfolio. I only had four visitors today, and I answered questions on our discussion board.

Mostly for the past two days, I’ve been working on things for our REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program which starts on June 1, and catching up with some students and colleagues that I haven’t had time for in a while.

Tomorrow during my “final exam” I will finish out the class’s project presentations. We will have pizza, since the exam period is from 12:30 to 2:30 pm, which will be paid by the bursary I earned by doing the first-year seminar class in the fall. Some presentations will be good. Some presentations will be slightly less awesome. The pizza should be delicious.

I hope a few instructor-friends will show up for some pizza and to watch a few presentations. I am looking forward to the end of this semester. My classes were good; my careful attention on keeping it positive made a difference. Aside from that, it was a very difficult semester.

We’ve continued using scratch paper to write down the good parts of presenter’s talks.

After the first presentation, I started pulling out some over-the-top introductions for our speakers. Class, please welcome Professor Jones from the National Ocean Research Institute (a talk on Phytoplankton). Class, please welcome Professor Jane Doe from the Institute for Baseball Research and Numerical Modeling (modeling baseball bats and the sweet spot). Class, please welcome Dr. Finance a senior analyst at Morgan Stanley (the efficient portfolio frontier). Please welcome Dr. Mary Smith from the National Cancer Institute (tumor and immune system modeling). And of course, today we had a Zombie Outbreak (4 zombie talks in a row) in the afternoon course, with much madness and mayhem.

I should have brought my This is my Zombie Killing Shirt to class ..

I ran the experiment today. I was rather pleased with the results. Students had no problems coming up with questions at the end of each talk, nor with praise for their classmates.

Here’s an example note. This one accidentally got left behind in the morning class. The student presenting was talking about a mathematical model for tumor growth and immune response.

This student got rattled by time running out for her presentation. Too many interesting things to say, and not enough time. It was still good job, and I am glad to know the classmates agreed.

In my afternoon class, I have two young ladies, neither of whom can make it to the final final presentation period for class, when we will finish presentations and have pizza. I asked them out to lunch next Monday. Both have been through their share of personal and academic troubles, but both have rallied and done well this semester. I want to tell them that I am proud of them.

The final projects are (mostly) in. Students start giving their final presentations in class tomorrow.

I will pass out pieces of scratch paper to the class and give instructions that they are to write down what the speaker does well and any questions they want to remember to ask at the end. If there’s anything else nice they want to say to the speaker, include that too.

Since I give grades (and criticism), I thought it would be good for the speakers to get plenty of praise from everyone else. I try to give praise too, but with a few students, I admit that I struggle. Hopefully it will be a feel good exercise. Maybe it will even promote paying attention.