Sometimes, especially as the semester is coming to an end, I get discouraged. We didn’t “cover” all the material. We are tired. My students get hung up on simple problems – they forget how to take a derivative, or they have not mastered using symbols rather than numbers in equations. Still. After all this time in class.

Then I read this (from a student writing in the weekly assigned reflection):

But back to our group name, The Killer Whales is not just a P chem group; it really is a way of life. Ask [my groupmates] and they would say the same thing, once [you’re] in the group the only way out is, there’s no way out. I admit I was not happy about the groups when we first started the class but now I should be thanking you; I finally found my true pod (I think its called a pod, not a pack). A bond that we will share until the end of time, even in the deepest darkest depth of the ocean we will be there for each other. It will be a sad day when the semester ends, though we may not have P chem together we will always be The Killer Whales, and that’s the true meaning of life.

Or this

I would like to start off this journal by mentioning how much I’m going to miss this class. I can’t believe this but I’m actually going to miss working with group members and all the lessons that we learned. I know after taking [engineering] thermodynamics this class would seem really easy to me, but I did learn
alot of details about how the equations come to place. Putting this class together makes the perfect sense. I did learn alot and everything that I learned in [engineering] thermodynamics makes so much more sense now.

And I am reminded about why I teaching using POGIL.