Comments on: Skipping class

By: elementaryteacher

elementaryteacher — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:09:01 +0000

I had a student come in with the best excuse for not having his homework done, and it WAS true. His house caught on fire the night before (started by a chimney fire). Luckily he and his family escaped unhurt. He was worried I wouldn’t believe him (one of the most responsible students in the class).

Eileen
Dedicated Elementary Teacher Overseas (in the Middle East)
elementaryteacher.wordpress.com

By: rwp

rwp — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:42:01 +0000

I never ask students why they weren’t in class, unless they come to office hours and have Fs on projects or the exam and I knew they weren’t in class. It’s not feasible to take attendance in a lecture hall with 250 students. However, I do give pop quizzes, always at the end of class, and on those days, TAs hand the scantrons out at the door for the first five minutes. When the five minutes are up, the TAs take the scantrons back to my office and return. Come late, or don’t come, and you get a zero on the quiz.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:25:32 +0000

@student: I’ve actually written one of those letters before, although not quite so, um, bluntly. A company was considering hiring one of my students and asked for a reference, and I told the company that the student was a competent worker — so long as she feels like working, and so long as the work is, in HER opinion, interesting enough to merit her attention. But if the company had some pressing business and wanted her to take care of it, it was a crap shoot — maybe she’ll take a shine to the assignment and get it done, or maybe she’ll just figure she was getting a raise anyway and perhaps her time was better spent doing something else. You pay your money and you take your chances.

And I tell that story to every student who gives me the “I had a thing” treatment. College students are adults, and so I let them make their choices and take the consequences. If they want to establish a reputation for themselves as underachievers, and possibly screw themselves over grade-wise, then I will make the consequences and policies clear to them, and I will tell them why it’s better to be responsible, but otherwise leave them alone. I have no problem with letting students develop good judgment through the exercise of bad judgment.

By: Student

Student — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:56:21 +0000

Usually, if a prof asks why I didn’t show up to a class, I say “I had a thing.” Upon being pressed, I follow that with a hand wave and a “don’t worry about it.” That’s when the usually-miffed prof gives up.

Check this out:
http://chasingtenureinsociology.blogspot.com/2007/01/honest-letter-that-i-wish-i-could-write.html

When you’re the person the Chasing Tenure author is writing about, you know it. You know you’re getting an A anyway, and you know your time’s better spent reading a good book on an interesting subject. So why bother showing up?

If you can get past my incendiary tone, I’d really be interested in reading an answer.

By: rwp

rwp — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:18:01 +0000

Oh, and Mitch Daniels’s daughter asked if she could miss class at the beginning of the semester to attend the inauguration. I was really busy getting ready for the semester and I hadn’t read it carefully, so I didn’t realize it was his daughter, but I told her sure, since she was missing only the first day, and asked her to drop by the office to pick up her materials. It was about a month after the semester started that the chairman was down in my office and we were chatting, and he asked me how the Governor’s daughter was doing. That’s how I found out she was my student.

By: rwp

rwp — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:15:02 +0000

I’ve had a few memorable legitimate excuses. I had a student *ask me* if it would be okay if he missed class so he could attend his naturalization ceremony! I said absolutely, and congratulations!

I’ve had a number of students who had to drop to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thanked them for their service.

I’ve also had a couple of oopses. I had one student keel over and die of a heart attack in the hall as I was getting ready to let students in for the final — he’d been up all week, eating speed.

I once had the students on a cohort complain that one of the cohort had disappeared, and I hadn’t seen him in class, so I sent him an email message that while not rude, wasn’t the most patient message I’ve sent. About a week later, I got an email message from an account I’d never seen, AOL, I believe. It was the student’s father. He had been killed in a car accident. I felt really bad about that message I’d sent.

By: Julia

Julia — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:13:06 +0000

At my school, most of the lecture classes don’t have any kind of attendance policy, or the policy goes unenforced. Pretty much everyone skips all their classes on their birthday.

By: Dean

Dean — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:02:37 +0000

I teach math and statistics at a business-oriented school. Last year, in a course covering discrete topics (graph theory/networks, game theory, etc) I had a guy in his mid-30s, manager of some sort at a local business, who continually tried to argue with me (and other faculty, as it turned out) that because he had to travel for his job, he shouldn’t have to do the homework/tests/projects for material covered while he was gone.
When asked whether this type of argument would fly on his job, his standard answer was “I don’t know, I wouldn’t think of trying: work is important.”
He did learn that it didn’t fly with faculty, but he continued to try.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:05:52 +0000

@jif: To clarify — For my classes, “excused” absences refer to situations where students miss a graded assessment that was administered in class (exam, quiz, etc.) and the student has some valid excuse, where “valid” is defined in the syllabus. For everyday class meetings, on the other hand, I have a lightweight attendance policy for freshman-level courses and no policy for sophomore-level and above.

I find freshmen need guidance when adjusting to the freedom of college, and they’re a lot more likely to make good choices about attendance if they have some sort of punitive system for skipping too much. I give them four “sick days” per semester which they can use for whatever they want (except to miss a quiz, test, etc.) but then a steep penalty for the fifth and higher absence. That’s modeled after most employers’ sick day/vacation policy in the “real world”.

By: Suzi

Suzi — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:57:49 +0000

I reward attendance and punish absence, so it does matter whether students come.

Reasonable excuses included a final at another college, a best friend’s funeral, military duty, a child in the hospital, and appearing before the judge for probation hearing.

Fake excuses included funeral (for a non-dead person), being sick (when not), and having been in a car accident which caused a miscarriage. The student who gave me the latter excuse had missed three weeks of class. I checked on her other classes. She had missed different three week periods in each class.