What a delight

And I don't mean that sarcastically!

I had forgotten how wonderful it was to teach a class full of mature responsible people, with NO special snowflake types. I realized that this afternoon in lab. The lab I did this week is one that's labor-intensive and has a lot of calculations, but it's not really hard - most of the calculations are just the same thing over and over, and once you figure it out, it's pretty automatic.

But, because there's a lot of data-extraction, I always used to get whiners: "What do you meeeeeeeeaaaaaan we need 100 data points? That's a loooooooot." or "This is haaaaaaard." or "This is borrrrrrrring."

(oh honey. Oh. you are planning on going to pharmacy school? Learn to deal with repetitiveness and things that seem boring.)

And they would bitch at me for being "mean" to expect so much of them. And there'd be that one group, because they were so busy complaining, that lab would be half over and they'd not be done extracting their data.

And that kind of thing drives me bananas. One thing I learned at a fairly early age is that if you have ANY kind of time consuming or onerous task to do, if you just shut up and get started on it, you get done a lot faster than if you spend all this time moaning about it.

But the group this semester? After I finished the pre-lab instructions, they were like "OK. We see what we need to do" and got down to work on it.

Of course, several of the folks are non-trad students, several have outside employment (a couple work at medical labs, one is a relief driver for an ambulance service). And a couple of them are Honors students - so there are some different attitudes in the class this semester from what I often get.

And by sitting down and doing the work without complaining? They got done *early*.

Another thing that made me happy? One group got a little confused on the calculations but instead of going "I don't GET this this is HARD explain it to me AGAIN" they got up and went to the chalkboard where I had written out an example calculation and went through it again - and then they got it! And they seemed pleased with themselves for doing that. Yes. Initiative is a good thing. Come and find me, guys, when you need a letter of recommendation for graduate or professional school.


I wish all my classes were like this. Teaching would be a dream.