It’s the last day of classes! I’m pretty sure I’ll be surviving this semester. Today is the due date for a huge pile of long, detailed lab reports, and I was dreading it — it was going to be like being run over by a dump truck. But I told my genetics students that I’d really, really appreciate it if they turned in their papers early, so that I could spread out the burden and get them all graded a little early. As inducement I also told them that I’d be able to give them more information about their final grade sooner, which is important to them since the final is optional, and they could use that knowledge to decide whether to sink time into studying for it.

And my students were awesome, and 3/4 of them got the papers to me early, so they sort of trickled in in manageable numbers over this last week, and I only went mildly nuts with grading, rather than majorly nuts tonight and this weekend when I tried to wrestle with them all at once.

(Any students who are turning them in on the due date: you’re also awesome, still. Getting the submissions spread out was my goal, and that mission has been accomplished.)

I also told them that not getting them all at once would allow me to take time off tonight to go to the movie tonight and see Captain America: Civil War. There are lots of nerds in science classes, so I think I tapped into their empathy.

The grind is not over. More papers coming in today, and final exams to grade next week, but for a change, today is not looking like the giant woodchipper on my calendar that it was earlier.