It’s everyone’s favorite time of the trimester. Photo courtesy of junior Alma Tinoco.

  Finals week is here at San Luis Obispo High School, and students aren’t the only ones who need to be prepared.  Expressions asked two teachers about how they have been preparing for finals and how it has been leading up to this dreaded time. 

Expressions: How are you as a teacher preparing for finals currently?

Digital media teacher Zachary Roper: Well, for most of the digital media classes our finals consist of students presenting their final projects. So these are going to be projects they’ve worked on for the last couple of weeks. The graphic design class is going to be redesigning local businesses. So they found businesses that had bad logos to start with a redesigned them are going to present us and to some local business leaders. So I’m just kind of getting all those things set up. But most of it just making sure that everybody’s staying on track with their projects. Once you’ve been working on for something for like several days you get sick of it and then they kind of give up or they give up their effort, so I’m trying to like be a cheerleader and keep them going to the final part. 

US history teacher Erik Benitez-Foster: I want to make sure that I have all my grades submitted in all the projects recorded on my gradebook and to make sure to get in touch with those students that they still have this report before the end of the week so they can get credit for it and be able to concentrate on the finals and greatest finals and get it done on time.

Expressions: Have you been seeing any influx of late assignments? 

Roper: No, not really. And I think the tutorial period is really helped with that because the students who were falling behind have come in doing tutorial and caught up.

Benitez-Foster: Yes, not many as before, because for the last two to three weeks I have been reminding students to submit everything on time and that really paid off and now I only have a few students that are submitting some work. That is, that was due a few days ago.

Expressions: Do you feel your students are prepared for finals?

Roper: I feel like they’re in pretty good shape. they’ve practiced doing a lot of these projects before. And so now it’s just you know, some people get nervous about presenting from the class but they’ve gotten the work to back it up.

Benitez-Foster: I hope so. I hope that in my class, they are prepared. I know we have went through a lot of information, and I hope that they’re getting ready to really, really shine. They’re doing a project so I hope that this project were really really show what they can what they know what they can do.

Expressions: Are you looking forward to grading all of your students finals?

Roper: Yeah, I’m okay with that. I don’t have to engrave like massive essays or anything like that. So seeing how they present their work and having them reflect on their their creative process is kind of fun for me to listen to, so I don’t mind it.

Benitez-Foster: Yes, I am. I’m looking forward to reading the newspaper that they’re creating and the information that they’re able to put down and the design of the newspapers. I’m looking forward to reading everyone, yes. 

  Good luck with finals to every Tiger on campus!