My End-of-Semester Ritual

For quite a few years now I have ended my semester with a ritual like this:

  • Grade the final.

  • Calculate and submit course grades.

  • Clean up all physical course materials and declutter my office. Recent years have seen the use of fewer physical materials in my teaching, but there are still things like markers and exams that students never bothered to pick up.

    I do this right after the course grades are sent to the Registrar. There’s no way you (or at least I) can complete a project as large as teaching a semester-long, upper-level course and not feel a sense of relief when it’s over. I’ve spent months being responsible for all aspects of a college class. I finish off the semester with hours of grading a final exam and then determining course grades.1 No matter how hard I try, I’m not going to be productive the rest of the afternoon anyway, so I might as well do some low-thought tasks that will otherwise never get done.

  • Put all electronic course materials in a safe spot for future retrieval. This has been a critical part of my workflow even in my earliest days of teaching. I always query material from the prior several offerings of a class. I didn’t keep good records the first time I taught (I wrote out paper notes before each class and then lost most of them) so I had to redo everything from scratch the second time. I vowed that would never happen again.

    In the early days, this meant making copies of all course notes, exams, homework, and everything else on my hard drive and moving them to floppy and Zip drives. Then we got USB drives. Later I used version control, so it was nothing more than rearranging some files and adding a text file with comments. Now I use Obsidian Sync during the semester, so I copy all files into a directory inside a Git repo holding all offerings of that class.

  • Reflect on what went well and what went poorly, and then store that information for use the next time I teach the class. It took me a few years to understand the importance of this step. Relearning the same mistakes and then saying to myself “Hey, I learned that the last time I taught this class, and here I am learning it all over again.” Github comes in handy for this. All I have to do is create a new repo for the next offering of the class and dump some markdown notes inside it. Now that I use Obsidian, I plan to create a new folder in my teaching vault for the next offering of the class. We’ll see how that turns out.

Last Updated 2021/12/17


  1. For the most part, assigning course grades is straightforward. Most students have a good idea of their course grade before they even take the final. The pressure comes from deciding whether and how much to curve grades. This decision affects several students each semester, and it’s more made worse by the big discontinuity from A to B, B to C, and C to D. (There’s no pressure related to giving F’s. That might sound surprising, but I’ve never thought much about it. Someone getting an F probably skipped at least one exam. The few exceptions to that have involved things like coming to class only to take the exams and having an average exam score of 12. I can’t imagine anyone hesitating to give an F in those circumstances.)↩︎