Every class is different. The collection of students is different and the professors are different. And then there are other factors: the room, the time of day, the time of year, what’s going on in the world, and all different kinds of contexts.
All of this is preamble to the last days of class. My two classes couldn’t have ended differently. One class was all smiles and hugs and students taking pictures with each other and with the faculty. The other class just kind of…drifted out. There’s no right way to end a class, of course. Just different feels and different experiences. It doesn’t mean the second class had a worse learning experience or learned less. Like I said: each class is different.
I’d like to figure out the best ways for every student to have the best experience in a class, but that might be an impossible task. For one thing, everyone learns differently and while you strive to be accommodating, classes are too large to change the syllabus and pedagogy to work for everyone equally. For another, some classes people have to take and others they want to take, so the attitude students come in with will affect their attitude towards the class. And finally, classes are challenging because learning is challenging and some people don’t enjoy those challenges (or at least the particular challenges in my classes) or get burned out with too many challenges (CMU is famous for this). It’s unrealistic to expect graduate-level classes at a top-tier university to always be pleasant. The best you can hope for is to keep students in flow.