Yesterday I gave my last class for this school year’s summer session. While I enjoyed teaching Business Writing, I also breathed a sigh of relief. Now I only need to grade the last set of exercises and quizzes, and I can look forward to… preparing classes for the first semester.

These are the things I learned from this year’s summer classes:

1. The summer schedule sucks. At least mine did. Three hours a day, four days a week, for six and a half weeks straight, is draining. In the mid-term assessment, I got low marks for enthusiasm; on some days I had to drag myself from the office to the classroom for the day’s class, and it showed.
2. The best way to learn how to write is, well, to write. I incorporated more writing exercises into the class this time around, with better results (I think). It was not an easy decision to make when I was just preparing the syllabus at the beginning of April, because I would deliberately be making my life more difficult (at least one one quiz and one writing exercise a week = 120 to 180 papers to check every week, multiplied by six weeks), but in the end I think it was the right one.
3. Large classes aren’t good, both for the teacher and the students. By some weird scheduling anomaly, I ended up with 45 students in one class and 22 in the other. The class of 45 was eventually trimmed down to 38 and the class of 22 remained at 22, and although I delivered the same content for both sections, it was still more tiring to teach the bigger class. There were more distractions, and fewer opportunities for interaction. Smaller classes = more interaction = more involvement, for students and the teacher = more learning.