Teaching Thursday: Wisdoming and Class Attendance

I generally try to avoid offering wisdom to my students. This is largely because I don’t think wisdom is something that one can learn from another person. Wisdom is the fruit of experience. At the same time, as I stare down my 20th year at UND and my 30th year in the college classroom, I’ve come to imagine that I’m the exception. Somehow I have wisdom that I can and MUST share.

I realize that this is ridiculous, and to keep me from being one of the “Those Guys,” I limit my proffering of wisdom to the first day of class. And I limit my wisdom to five points:

1. Come to class. 2. Pay attention. 3. Write things down. 4. Don’t procrastinate. 5. Remember that an “A” in an easy class is worth the same for your GPA as an “A” in a hard class.

That’s it. 

I’ve recently readsome studies on grades and class attendance which suggest that attending class has a strong relationship to grades. What’s more interesting is that the authors of a 2010 study discerned that mandatory attendance policies do not have as strong an influence over grades. In fact, they suggest that mandatory attendance policies might only have some small effect on the grades of students who would otherwise fail the class.

This story got me wondering about the impact of telling students to attend class and whether it has an impact similar to a mandatory attendance policy or not. As readers of this blog know, I’ve long held a theory that students are prone to resist authority in the classroom, and while sometimes I’ve argued that students follow a “Johnny Theory” of resistance (“What are you rebelling against? What do ya got?”), I have increasingly come to believe that students resist strategically. In particular, their resistance strategies target policies, recommendations, and arguments that they feel are unsound, unfair, or unjust. This form of resistance tends to coalesce around recommendations of the kind that I’ve made above, particularly regarding class attendance. In other words, the act of recommending that students attend class serves as a point around which student resistance can form. It may be that mandatory attendance policies (or other punitive strategies designed to enforce attendance) represents a tacit acknowledgement that recommending attendance without visible and regular consequences (say, pop quizzes, or structured grade reduction for missing class) is doomed to fail. 

This, in turn, validates my generally feeling that most people don’t acquire wisdom from others (even when they acknowledge that the other individual has some authority or particular competence). The desire to resistance explicit statements reflects a deep skepticism toward institutional manifestation of authority that is longstanding, but particularly valorized in the contemporary political scheme.

In short, my offer of wisdom is unlikely to move the needle and may actually do more harm than good especially in the current political landscape.