Final Grades

It's a week before Christmas and I am neck-deep in final grades for my fall courses. One challenge is reading papers, especially term papers for the PBJ practicum (PBJ 397), but another challenge is wrestling with the persistent question: What have the students learned? I don't doubt that my students have learned something from their fieldwork or from studying suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia (PBJ 377), but that learning is not always demonstrated in their academic work. Can someone spend 15 weeks in a course and still be making the same errors at the end that they did in the beginning? The answer is yes. It's very discouraging sometimes. On the other hand, when you read a paper or essay that shows that a student has learned over the course of the semester, that's very gratifying. It's the season of hope, and at final grades time, hope is very useful.