Blowing & Drifting

Today, I submitted the final grades for the online course I taught this summer for Metro State University in St. Paul, “World War II – A Global History.” This is the twelfth time I’ve taught for Metro State since fall 2003, and the third time I’ve taught this particular course, always online. I felt like I finally had it “down” this time, thanks in part to some particularly strong students. The discussions, the midterm and final exams, and especially and the five-part cumulative paper assignment (an idea I stole from some Carleton faculty) really worked well this time around, which is almost as pleasing as teaching the course was sometimes tiring and frustrating.

My Metro State students are usually about half traditional-age college students and half “grown ups” who are either getting a second college degree or finishing their first one. It almost goes without saying that the working adults are the harder workers – though at the same time they tend to be less imaginative and more inclined to connect the dots. (Not unlike their instructor, in some ways. He too has a “day job”!) The best individual students are often the traditionals, young men and women who I think would succeed at most colleges.

And then there are the traditionals who are traditional in less appealing ways, like the five students who earned grades of “F” this term (including students who earned 92, 87, and 12 points out of 200 – the last was still emailing me about “catching up” last week!) and the young man who emailed me literally moments before I submitted the final grades:

When are final grades due? Also this has been a really interesting course and you really challenged us. I learned so much from this course.

His grade wasn’t bad, but this blatant appeal made my eyes roll.

But whatever. This is a decent gig, I tell myself, both a good way to earn extra money and a good way to practice at least some of the skills I learned in grad school. As a reward for teaching all these Metro State classes as well as finishing (in six weeks) the infinitely more onerous and unrewarding task of serving on the townhouse-association board, I think I’m going to buy myself an iPad – which coincidentally costs almost exactly as much as one of my Metro State paychecks and which will be pretty handy for using to teach the online courses.