Reflection at the End of the Semester

During the beginning weeks of my writing course, we read a couple works on liberal education at the beginning of the semester, listen to a talk by the dean, and the students write an essay about liberal education.

For the past several weeks, my students have been working on their research papers. So yesterday, I gave them a quiz: I asked them to write a paragraph about how their work on the research paper has contributed to their liberal education.

And you know what, they wrote good paragraphs. They dug out their notes and copies of the essays and referred to what we'd discussed earlier in the semester. Then most of them gave very specific examples of something they'd applied in working on their research paper, and talked about that in terms of their education. That is, they're pretty much all able to talk about some text in terms of their own experience in a specific way. Yay students!