Lovely to hear a ‘thanks for today’

‘Thanks for today’. Just three little words made all the difference to me earlier this week. I’d been teaching my first ever Legal Skills workshop block which runs over 4 hours from 9am to 1pm. I was pretty happy with it. Some of the timing was a little off and it could do with a little more activity based stuff in the first half but essentially it worked well. It was quite hard to gauge the student reception. They were pretty alert, mostly on time, they came back after breaks, they did the tasks, they asked some sensible questions… and many said ‘thanks’ in the sort of generic way you say thanks when you are leaving somewhere where you’ve had a not too horrid time. However, 3 students separately did more than that and made an effort to come by, make eye contact and actually say ‘thanks for today Jess’. None will have known how nervous I was before I started that session and none will have known how welcome their comment was after 4 hours of pretty full on teaching. Knowing that to some students I made a little bit of a difference is why I do what I do. So, the nerves have gone now (see earlier post) and have been replaced with a very familiar end of September feeling  – a sense of happy exhaustion.