I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.
Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …
If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.
And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.
But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.
I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.
The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.
Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.
In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.
We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.
In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.
Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.
It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s work.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
We watched that sunset at Downpatrick Head.
