Another Semester Bites the Dust

Posted on August 16, 2003 by glasscastle

The end of a semester is always a bittersweet occasion.
The students are all bitter and the teacher is looking at six sweet weeks
of vacation! No, just joking. The Summer semester LLM Legal English program
I teach in ended this afternoon with a Champaign and cheese reception.
The students, lawyers all, looked more at home and at ease milling around
with
drinks
in their hands than they had in the classroom. Foto from LobsterFest.
I’ve been through this now like 75 times (three
semesters per year, you do the math) but every time I hand in the paperwork
and bid my students adieu, the experience of relief is an echo of that
marvelous June day each year of our youths when we knew we were leaving
school for the last time for a long time (maybe forever, a little voice
whispered), and an endless skein of summer days stretched out on the mental
horizon.

As much as I love each group I work with, and I do come to empathize with
their struggles and successes, to vicariously live their triumphs and defeats,
as well as the wonder and raw awareness of holding your own in a foreign country in
a second language for the first time, it is a relief to be done. And as
much as I hope they all stay in touch and advise me of their progress,
I am sincerely glad I won’t be seeing them all every day now as I have for
the past six weeks.

What’s on tap for the down time? Reading, blogging, a graphic redesign
of this site, trolling for paying work, home, car and body maintenance,
fishing,
tennis, cheap highbrow cultural ops, free lowbrow cultural ops, a few days
in NYC and Maine if I’m lucky. By the middle of September I’ll be primed
and ready for the next bunch.
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