Teaching Tuesday: Attendance, Time, and Risks

This semester I’m thinking about three things that I’ve struggled with in my teaching over the last few years. 

Attendance. I’m getting pretty tired of students with irregular attendance habits. I know that this reflects the increasing complexity of student lives. I also know that most students who struggle with attendance are not lazy or undisciplined, but are forced to make difficult compromises sometimes at the expense of school. 

This realization has driven me to consider some bizarre solutions which probably would not work in a practical sense. I’m concerned in particular about my intro level classes where group work is central to learning. If half a group stops attending for various reasons, then this short circuits group work both for those in the room and those who have missed the day. This has led me to consider some solutions grounded in various forms of contract grading. Students for whom attendance will be a struggle can have alternate assignments, deadlines, and projects. Perhaps they can even be put together in certain “super groups” where even if many students don’t attend, the rest of the group still has sufficient critical mass to function during class time. The trick is to figure out how to do this without penalizing myself, introducing a bunch of unnecessary paperwork and grading, or penalizing the students who often have legitimate reasons to struggle with attendances.

Time. Years ago, I did away with most deadlines in my classes. They were not getting students to turn in work on time and instead were causing an avalanche of excuses and late papers.

Recently students have started to tell me that they are uncomfortable without deadlines. Deadline apparently structured their previous schooling (and I suspect most of their courses in college). Of course, I recognize that all school is fundamentally time-based and I’m stingy with incomplete grades as most faculty are. But I also want to give my students the tools to succeed in class.

I’m not entirely sure how to find a compromise so I’m doing three things. First, I’m stressing that the lack of deadlines does not mean there isn’t a flow to the class and that one assignment should be done before another. Second, I’m creating a few hard deadlines around the first set of assignments and the midterm to help students create good habits in my class. Finally, I’m trying to be more explicit WHY I am not stressing deadlines nor enforcing punitive measures when an assignment is late.

So far, students seem more able to turn things in on time.

Risks. The final thing that I’m trying to work on is encouraging my students to take risks in their work. By risks, I mean intellectual risks. My students, who are often very good, tend to get hung up on things like how I want citations or how I want the paper or test organized.

I’m not entirely sure how to incentive risk taking in a risk averse classroom. Again, if some of students’ anxieties about deadlines stem from their experience with deadlines in other classes and in secondary school, I wonder whether this might also explain their aversion to risk. 

What is interesting to me is that students’ aversion to risk and their occasional obsession with deadlines (and struggle to adapt without them) speaks to a kind of compliance culture among students. This makes me sad.

What is odd, however, is that this doesn’t extend, necessarily, to attendance. And this offers a flicker of hope that students remain capable of resisting my passionate arguments for them to attend. It may even mean that I’ll need to do more than simply incentivize attendance. As with risk, incentivizing opportunities doesn’t necessarily seem to accomplish my short term goals.

At the same time, my fear is that if I do anything to disincentivize missing class, I’ll simply reinforce a sense that school and learning is about compliance and this is the opposite of what I’m trying to do.