I make goodbye cards for the students at the end of each semester — hand-colored and signed, although the black outlines are mass produced from a single original. Unlike previous years, this spring I made a different card for each of the three preps I taught — about 175 cards in all, allowing for some extras to give to colleagues.
You should know that the stick figures (teacher with top-hat, students without) make frequent appearances in the class notes. The various interpretations of non-hat-wearing figures making a run for it would not have been lost on them.
Goodbye to AP Precalculus
The kids in these two periods went thru a lot. It was way more than they were used to. I had students used to straight-As in tears after every test. That they were all mostly smiling and cheerful at the end was remarkable — partially due to the generous curve I applied to the gauntlet of tests they took during the final weeks, and also to the fact that the actual AP test was easier than those we had grilled them with.
Goodbye to Advanced Algebra 2
Many of the kids in these three periods were rascals. Some of them felt like 8th graders all year long.
(I hear some of you whispering, “And your point is…?”)
By the end we had bonded pretty tightly.
I overheard one of the kids, one of the 8th grade protagonists interestingly enough, mutter to
another student, “Wait. Did he hand-draw each of these!?” as he pointed to differences in the shading and color-scribbles.
Goodbye to Precalculus
Half of these kids were seniors. The other half were juniors. It was one period of only about a dozen people at the beginning of the day. The 8th grader in all of them was far in the distant past, which was a blessing, as I didn’t expect to teach this class and only found out about it the week before school started. They were really good to me.
The card I gave them was hand-colored as were the others, but I gave them all away before I snapped the pictures. So this is the “master” before the coloring and signing.
