There is nothing that says SPRING than the wind-down of the semester. You can just feel the energy shifting as you hear people around campus discussing their final exams and summer plans, giving up their winter coats (although it is still chilly here), playing soccer out on the quads, and more bikes in the bikestands. It is definitely cross-cultural.
Yesterday was my last class.
While Sheila's mom was here she was asking if the students would throw me a party on the last day. She had a great plan that if they would, then I could go home and make that a regular thing in my classes in America: party on the last day!!!
Well, they did not throw a party, but at the end of the lecture they clapped!
It was the strangest thing. Particularly since I thought the ending was rather awkward, flat and stinted. I asked if that's what they normally do at the end and one student said that it was not. I asked if it was some sort of a "cascade" (we had just covered the notion of cascades in class -- when people start making decisions based on other people's actions rather than on their own information) and that, in fact, the students are quite independent thinkers. So that was a great compliment.
In reality I think that they don't expect much out of professors in terms of teaching here. It's all "chalk and talk" as we would say at home, which just doesn't fly anymore where I come from. In order to a) get decent student evaluations and b) eventually get promoted, you need to show nearly constant attention to your teaching whether that be through attending faculty development seminars and conferences, to developing new teaching techniques that you measure and assess. We are all about active learning and regular assessment at UWL.
Anyway, I guess that is all to say that it was probably a low hurdle. But it was a great experience none-the-less. I found the students to be incredibly polite and interested (at least the ones who spoke with me). They seemed engaged in the material and interested. I couldn't do the level of classroom activities that I would do at home such as participating in online classroom experiments, because we just couldn't move quickly enough with so many students and only having fifty minutes at a time. But it was still good and we did do a few experiments.
So now we have a little over a month to go. My final is in Mid May and Maggie has finals toward the end of May. There is still a lot to see, so we are still packing it in. Look for more "top ten" lists on this blog, restaurant reviews and mountain walks! Tomorrow is supposed to be nice so we are taking Johnny and his friend Abby up Sugarloaf for a bit of fresh air.
Yesterday was my last class.
While Sheila's mom was here she was asking if the students would throw me a party on the last day. She had a great plan that if they would, then I could go home and make that a regular thing in my classes in America: party on the last day!!!
Well, they did not throw a party, but at the end of the lecture they clapped!
It was the strangest thing. Particularly since I thought the ending was rather awkward, flat and stinted. I asked if that's what they normally do at the end and one student said that it was not. I asked if it was some sort of a "cascade" (we had just covered the notion of cascades in class -- when people start making decisions based on other people's actions rather than on their own information) and that, in fact, the students are quite independent thinkers. So that was a great compliment.
In reality I think that they don't expect much out of professors in terms of teaching here. It's all "chalk and talk" as we would say at home, which just doesn't fly anymore where I come from. In order to a) get decent student evaluations and b) eventually get promoted, you need to show nearly constant attention to your teaching whether that be through attending faculty development seminars and conferences, to developing new teaching techniques that you measure and assess. We are all about active learning and regular assessment at UWL.
Anyway, I guess that is all to say that it was probably a low hurdle. But it was a great experience none-the-less. I found the students to be incredibly polite and interested (at least the ones who spoke with me). They seemed engaged in the material and interested. I couldn't do the level of classroom activities that I would do at home such as participating in online classroom experiments, because we just couldn't move quickly enough with so many students and only having fifty minutes at a time. But it was still good and we did do a few experiments.
So now we have a little over a month to go. My final is in Mid May and Maggie has finals toward the end of May. There is still a lot to see, so we are still packing it in. Look for more "top ten" lists on this blog, restaurant reviews and mountain walks! Tomorrow is supposed to be nice so we are taking Johnny and his friend Abby up Sugarloaf for a bit of fresh air.
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