Tag: teaching

I’m not going to tell them this but I think that my students have been great, this semester.

I got to teach a class of 74 final year students and they were awfully good sports. My style of teaching is like play and it’ll only work if the students are active participants, which they were. Nobody fell asleep through the 42 hours of lectures that we had together.

There were several claims of bloody murder and cries of pain and terror. However, all the inflicted pain was always done with their best interests at heart. Although there were a few misses here and there, they were mostly able to hit the mark.

Some of them are graduating soon and their bags are already packed. I think that I will honestly miss some of the oddballs. It is fun to work with final year students when they are good enough to knead with. I hope that I did a small part in shaping their futures positively.

I keep using the word fun because it has honestly been – FUN!

I would like to wish them the best in their future endeavours and I hope that they will recall my oft uttered remark – ‘it depends’ – when someone asks them a really tough question for, in engineering, nothing is precise nor certain and everything is a shade of glee.

Today, my students sat for the final paper of their examinations – my paper! After about 2 hours, one students turned up at my office to complain to me about killing them. He claimed that more than half the class will fail.

Again, I am glad that I am pushing the students to their limits and beyond. That’s my job as an educator.

However, I have yet to actually mark the papers. I intend to start marking them tonight and over the weekend. I hope that the students will beat my expectations.

Personally, I have no interest in failing students. However, I feel that it is my responsibility to push them and to show them a very important point, that there are no straight-forward answers to engineering problems and they all need to think their way through the problems.

I would like to wish my students good luck, and have a good holiday!

Update@2011-08-20: Just finished marking all 73 exam scripts!

The students actually did better than expected. Although there will definitely be a number of failures, I think that most of them will get through just fine. Quite a number of them did surprisingly well.