Show-Off Day

Repost from my personal blog

As if last semester's tortures weren't enough, I found myself signed up for another six weeks of summer classes back in mid-April. Today, mercifully, my class on Operating Systems Technologies had its last meeting. What can I say? I am going to miss this class.

Today's class was the most raucous I had ever run for Ateneo de Davao. My students' final presentations interspersed with cheers and catcalls and clapping and laughing. For a moment, I was afraid someone would knock on the door and reprimand us for being too loud. Perhaps I was the loudest one of all. Embarrassingly, I had also invited a co-teacher to witness the proceedings.

If we bordered on the unruly, it was because I had designated today Show-Off Day. Since after the midway point of the summer classes, I gave the students leeway on what special project they wanted to pursue. The first four weeks had been all lectures and programming assignments designed to give them as wide a scope of the technologies available under open source. In the last two weeks, I told them they could wander off my syllabus track, pick any project they wanted and, well, just run with it.

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