As an academic, I have always found June a sad month.  Yes: it marks the end of the teaching and examining year and the chance to catch up on research tasks and to deal with overdue administrative paperwork.  It normally heralds a summer holiday at some point within the next three months, and the chance to visit new places and recharge the batteries.

But it also marks the end of a close relationship with another group of students.  During my career I have taught second year classes from time to time, but much more of my undergraduate teaching has been at either first year or third year level.  For many years I taught first year practical classes - both general practicals and those relating to statistical methods and their applications in geography.  I also lectured to the big first year classes (often of over 250 students), introducing audience participation and discussion formats even within groups of that size.   I remember an institutional auditor, in the days when subject reviewers visited classes, attending one of my lectures and expressing a fear of anarchy when I launched one of these discussion sessions inviting students to come up with their own definition of age classes within a population, illustrating the way in which ideas of age banding are subjective and socially constructed..

But it's not easy to get close to a first year class of 250.

Third year groups are a different matter.  Although my third year option class once reached 84 students (and a senior colleague accused me of running a 'Mickey Mouse' course that clearly only attracted students because it was so easy - I inevitably saw things differently), I have generally taught final year groups of between 20 and 35.  Although I have taught such classes in collaboration with colleagues, I have often taught them on my own.  During my career I have also led 29 residential field classes at Easter - 1 in Oxford, 3 in Normandy, 12 in Paris, and 13 in Berlin.  In all these third year classes, of one sort or another, I have endeavoured to get to know my students, to see them as individuals, to try to find out what motivates them, and to encourage them to surprise themselves with what they can do, and what they know at the end of a course that they didn't know at the beginning.

Field class interactions have particular rewards. I am not thinking here about the night when, staying in East Berlin shortly after the wall came down, I was awakened at 4 in the morning (as was the whole neighbourhood) by some our students singing 'Barbie Girl' at full volume in the street.  I am instead thinking of the occasions when, at the end of a day of field observation in strange city a student has said 'Now I feel like a real geographer for the first time': these have been really rewarding moments.

It is the rapport that one builds up with a third year group, and with the individuals within it, that leads to my feeling of sadness at this time of the year.  One has just got to know a group really well - and then it's all over and they graduate and go.  The academic calendar turns another page and we start preparing for another year, and another fresh group to start working with.

I admit I feel this a little less since I stopped taking Easter field classes (my last one was in 2008 when I was already three-and-a-half-years into my PVC role), but it is still there - a regret at time passing. Today I feel it particularly in relation to the group of elected Students' Union officers with whom I work very closely during their year of office - and who then come to the end of their tenure leaving me to start building a new relationship with next year's group.

Last Friday the degree results were declared for my department, and I have already sent congratulatory e-mails to a number in my class (and received warm messages back). And at the end of this week there will be the changeover in the Students Union officers.  Another year is over, and a new one starts.

I will be starting my annual leave towards the end of July, so there will only be four blogging days in that month - 7th, 11th, 21st, and 26th.