A Nice Teaching Moment

I've been teaching our undergraduate research methods course this year. It is grueling and frustrating, for reasons that anyone who has taught a course like this in any discipline will know.

And today, they brought in their paper drafts for peer review. As I flipped through them while deciding who would get which couple of papers to review, I noted that (with one exception) they had all followed the instructions. They were all complete papers, with footnotes and bibliography. They had all submitted an electronic version as well. And when I broke them up into their peer review groups for them to introduce their papers to the people who would be reviewing them, I heard lots of excited conversation about their own topics. I heard one student telling another about a great source that she could add to her paper that she hadn't previously known about. And when I told them that, even though they still had a major revision and a presentation ahead of them, the hardest part was over, and they should be proud of themselves, there were nods and smiles.

This, from a group of students who, in our individual conferences two weeks ago, were by and large still finding their way.

There are likely to be bumps in the road once I start reading them, but that can wait until later. Tonight, I'm going to focus on the fact that my students got to leave class tonight with a real sense of accomplishment, and I'll go to bed happy.