Last day of Class

Last day of my summer teaching as a graduate instructor was the day before. At the beginning of class, while I was just about to go upstairs to get some coffee for myself, a couple of my students running down the stairs handed me a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. They walked towards me with the bag and cup in their hands and thrust both out towards me with me looking no doubt a little blank. "Yes. We got it for you. A little going-away gift. Thanks..." I was so touched that all I could say about five times and more was "Thank you so much. That was awfully nice of you..." They seemed equally gleeful and one of the boys informed me "...and we were worrying whether you'd beat us to the cafe." "Yes, so we ran upstairs as fast as we could..." said the other.

And on the same day right at the end of that last class on that last day, I'd barely said a proper good bye to all the students...there were a couple of girls who came up and wanted an A instead of a B for the course. One of them plaintively inquired why she hadn't done well in the last quiz even though both of them had studied together till 3 O'clock the night before the quiz. There were more comments. They wanted me to increase the number of points for their class presentation. They accused me of not having enough assignments (which is why they hadn't done well). And then one of the girls made the mistake of saying, "I didn't know that I'd get a B if I missed 11 points." That was it. I told her that the information was in the syllabus and that I hadn't kept it a secret, and if she had wanted to get an A so badly then maybe she would have done well not to have waited until the very last day of class.

That was that more or less.