My Final Midterm Exam

Posted by Naomi Rockler-Gladen Mar 9, 2007

Wow, my last semester as a professor is just about halfway over. Spring Break starts tomorrow. And this week I gave my students a midterm exam, for the very last time.

I'm not going to miss giving exams. The experience is such a strange one! You hand out the test and the room becomes dead quiet, and people with miserable expressions on their faces spend an hour frantically trying to answer your questions. Their hands hurt. They haven't had enough sleep. The time they spend in the room with you that day is scene as a painful hoop that must be jumped through to get on with the rest of their lives.

Some days I feel like more than a dentist than an educator. If a dentist does a good job, inevitably some of her patients will hate and fear her. I imagine some professors enjoy the power trip, but not me.

After years of teaching, though, I must say I think the discipline that testing gives students is an important lesson. I used to give more take home exams and extensive papers and other more "democratic" methods of evaluations. But my rose colored glasses are off now. No, I haven't given up all my teaching ideals, but I also think that students need to learn to manage their time and learn to study systematically. The world may not ask them to define terms like hegemony and polysemy, as I did on this test, but the world will ask them to be disciplined and to handle stressful situations successfully and professionally,

But someone else can give them the tests from now on. I've done my part.

Please join me as I continue to blog about my last semester as a professor!