I have precisely three classes left this semester, each one hour long. Well, actually, fifty minutes, but you get the idea.

This evening, a final-exam postmortem with my English Through Drama class, and a final meeting with my evening Intermediate Composition class, where the students will write me a letter, at my request, about what they’ve learned in the last 15 weeks. Tomorrow morning, I’ll have another one-hour meeting with my other Composition students and they’ll do the same thing.

From then on, it’s all just about assigning final grades, marking one written final exam, and wading my way through 50-some essays (but without much in the way of handwritten notes or feedback — mostly just reading and assigning a grade) and 50-some Form-Project pieces, to which I will apply some handwritten feedback before I post them back to the students who included SASEs.

And then the semester will be done, and I’ll be enjoying my holidays. It’ll be nice to have a break. It’s looking like I’ll be in China for a couple of weeks in early January with an old student of mine from Montreal, named Randy, and in Canada (with Lime) for a couple of weeks in early-to-mid-February.

UPDATE (later that day): Well, now I’ve got only one class left. The end approaches! And I discovered one of my Chinese students will be in Beijing around the same time I’m planning to be there. Cool, huh? We shall probably meet for a meal, or for tea, or something. It’s not her hometown — that’s Ningpo — but she’ll be visiting Beijing with an American friend. So that’s nice.