This year

I started working on our Calc final and final review today.

That was a sentence I didn’t get to type last year.

This time last year we pivoted to distance learning, we cancelled finals, and we held our breaths as we pushed through those last weeks of 2020 with all that we had left, meager as that was.

We did our very, very best. We innovated our butts off. But to say that learning wasn’t lost would be a complete misunderstanding of the situation. It was a necessary shutdown, no doubt about it. But it (along with its brother shutdowns and quarantines) had ramifications that children, parents, and educators will feel for a while.

But this year.

This year we’re having finals!

Even after all these years, when I’m making a final, I find myself in awe of how far these kids have come. We started with limits, and now we’re doing implicit differentiation.

And the beautiful thing about finals and carving out time to study for finals? The kids get to see how far they’ve come, too. They see problems they struggled with in August become second nature by December.

And that’s the real joy. That’s the real lesson.

And this year…we get that.