Good-bye to the Fourth-year Students

From the year 2020, I have been using Dingtalk. It is a kind of Social Networking Service. A user can communicate with members such as sending messages and talking on videophone. Dingtalk seems to be a suitable platform for company managing. Thanks to such trait that it works well for an organization like a company, it is also good for me as a teacher to carry out on-line teaching. Now I teach students in classroom. On-line teaching is no longer needed. But I still use Dingtalk. And I have made new groups of the second-year and first-year students’ groups to communicate with them. It is useful for me to give instructions, homework assignments, and feedback.

I make one group for one class. There are two classes in one grade, so, two Dingtalk groups for one grade. Counting the years, I’ve just found that the current first-year students are of the seventh year, or the seventh grade. Under the condition that I use Dingtalk, I can register up to 500 students in my group. So, if I keep the groups and continue to have all the students, someday, the number of members is going to reach the upper limit and not be able to register a new member. Besides, many students stop visiting my group after his/her graduation. Therefore, I delete the groups of fourth-year students at the beginning of April every year. Although the graduation ceremony is in June or July, I am a Japanese, April 1^st is the starting day of a new school year.

Today is April 3^rd, I don’t have any class, so I implemented the deletions of fourth-year students’ groups. There are still students who frequently visit the upper group of my Dingtalk organization. Some are important person who represent the class. I moved such students to another group for alumni. To be honest, selecting a student to move is depending on my preference to some extent. I glanced the name list and decided who to move and who to delete. But there are several students whom I could not make decision easily to keep or delete. One student was excellent and communicated more often than other students. I was at a loss about her. The last message was on December 2022, that meant there was no communication in 2023. I sent the last message to say good-bye and QR code to rejoin my group.

Finishing moving some students from the fourth-year students’ group to the alumni group, I deleted the groups of two classes. In most case, there will be no communication with students after their graduation. Even if I keep them in the alumni group, four fifth don’t come to see the messages. It is sad to say, but relationships between students and a teacher don’t last long. But there are also students, one fifth in the alumni group, who come to see my messages. I want to continue to communicate with them.

I finished these things in morning hours. And I found that that student has read my last message. Dingtalk has a function that displays if a message you sent has been read or unread. There had been no direct communication with her more than a year, but she opened my message at once. I regret what I have done. I should have added her into the alumni group. That was a thing that I could do with two or three clicks. On the contrary, if I delete her, I should have done it without saying anything. Perhaps leaving the last message simply hurt her feeling. I am really sorry for her.