16 To be or not to be in class!

Blog 16 To be or not to be in class!

Today at one class today I had perfect attendance. All 22 students showed up to take the final examination. This had never happened before in all the years that I have been teaching that I had perfect attendance except when I had a class of three students who almost always showed up.

I then went to another college where three students showed up in error because they did not have to take the make-up midterm. They had been absent the last class session and had ignored the written announcement. Attendance in this class usually averages 25 of 37 students. You have to realize about ten students show up late. If I were strict in applying any college’s regulations on attendance, I would have an enormous failure rate. Let us say that the typical college regulation states I should penalize a student for being absent 10% and many have been absent between 20% and 40% of the time.

When I take attendance, I always strive to look at who is saying present. It is not unusual to have an occasional student to say present for another. Of course, I almost never send a sheet around for the students to sign because the names are simply forged. The few times I do I double check by a roll call.

Then we have the problem of what constitutes actual physical presence. Do I mark someone present who has made a heroic effort to come to class just five minutes before the end of the class? If it is just one time, I give the student the benefit of the doubt. Then we have students that go out for extended periods to the bathroom which may constitute the entire class period. A few are bold enough to go to the cafeteria for an extended break or bring stuff back. Or they may go out of the room two or three times in a 50 minute class. Then I have students who disappear. They go the bathroom and never come back. They sneak out during a video. Or they sneak out during a small group activity and never come back. Or they just sneak out.

Then if they are physically present, are they mentally present? A student or two may be sleeping because they did not enough sleep during the day or night. A student may be reading a newspaper or doing the work of another class. Students may be chatting, texting or playing games on the cell-phone. I have no idea whether or not they are taking notes on the laptop or playing video games. Or they may simply be chatting as if they were in Starbucks. Their fellow students strain to hear the presentation instead of telling them to be quiet. Unfortunately, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head to try to control such rudeness.

Now if I were in high school. I would suppose to be demonstrating good class management skills. But these are adults paying to be there. If this was a movie theater, none of this would be tolerated for a second.

Then I have students who ask for the missing handouts. What I usually do is save handouts for the next class session and then I throw them out. I explain to the students I teach too many classes to save the handouts or have the space to do so. In order to miss handouts, this means they had to miss two class sessions in a row. The dilemma with handouts is that they may actually student absences or inattention because they feel they don’t have to take notes.

Then of course the students claim they are present because you made a mistake in attendance. This is easily exposed by simply asking for the day’s notes for which some uncountable reason they don’t have. Or point out their name is missing from the group activity signup sheet of the day. I had one student who insisted she had been “too shy” to come forward after class to say she was present because she had been “late.” I told her she was too intelligent not to be noticed. I had to be PC on this because she was one beautiful black female, the only one in the class. I had anther student today who insisted he had been present the last three class sessions. The only problem was that I was trying to hand back an assignment for him to correct. Failure to correct this in a timely fashion meant a low grade.

And of course, they ask, did they miss anything important!