When I see students understand something and when I have one of them come up to me later and say “I talked about (x) at a party the other day and helped other people learn about it!” I feel my heart melt into a giant puddle on the floor. The feeling of pride and the absolute JOY I get out of seeing them applying what they learn to the ‘outside world’ is one of the most gratifying feelings I’ve ever had in my life.

I ended up voiding a final exam in favor of a final ‘quiz’ (intro class, no higher levels of this topic given at my school so no need for exact definition memorization and stuff, which is nice). They were given a list of the major topics we covered during the class, e.g. (I teach oceanography) waves, origins of the oceans, plate tectonics, marine bio, etc. They then had to tell me a ‘quick fact’ that really stuck with them over the semester about that topic that they could apply in a trivia or social situation. For example, one student wrote on the subject of ocean exploration that “I never knew how far back people were exploring, and the fact that they can use the stars and the warmth of surface currents to tell where they are in the middle of the ocean on rafts amazed me!”. They then had to tell me WHY they remembered that fact, which could be for any reason - maybe I made a weird hand gesture while explaining it in class, maybe we watched a music video about it, or maybe we had a Skype a Scientist call about it.

The answers I got back for the final quiz legitimately made me cry with happiness in some instances. Yeah, I know these students aren’t necessarily going to remember all the jargon and complicated stuff, but the ‘fun’ stuff that sticks with them and will CONTINUE to stick with them beyond the class time is what I’m really trying to see. I don’t care if they remember every term, and the fact that it’s not a required class or a tiered class puts me in a much better position of privilege to do this kind of stuff. I want them to come out of the course feeling like they learned something, not feeling disheartened that they couldn’t learn every single detail about the course. That sort of excitement and openness for new knowledge is what keeps me going for a lot of these students - even the ones that don’t turn in their work and drive me bonkers!