Last night I had my final class with my HS-M cohort (9th graders). They will be moving into the High School prep classes and I don't think I will be teaching them any more. I will miss this class. I never had a "bad" class with them. They were as unruly and sometimes as lazy as any other group of middle-schoolers, but they were remarkably intelligent and good-natured, and in the end, they are one of the best debate classes I've ever taught. They wanted to "play" during the last class, but I made them do a debate exercise where I gave them difficult propositions and randomly assigned PRO or CON positions, and with only a few minutes to prepare, they had to give little position speeches. The fact that they did pretty well with it tells me that they must have learned something. I wish I had taken video, but I'd removed the camera from the equation to help them feel less like this was a test and just show the skills they'd learned.
I've had some of them for 2-3 years now. I told them that they were a great class. I will miss that class. When I was having a bad day, having them as my last class was always a nice experience. Now my last class is likely to be the quite difficult successors to this HS-M cohort, the up-coming 8th graders.
Life goes on.
[daily log: walking, 6km]