With very few exceptions, I like the students in my class.
I have colleagues who would do just about anything to avoid teaching the introductory calculus-based physics classes that I teach. These classes are taken by students majoring in engineering, computer science and the mathematical and physical sciences, including physics. So almost none of my students want to do what I do for a living. But that’s OK. They are all interesting human beings, even the few that I never learn to like. I get to know all of them at least a little in my studio-style classroom that holds sixty or seventy students. I get to know some of them pretty well, and that is almost always a gratifying experience.
So it would seem only natural that I want them to show up for class. And mostly they do. On the average, about 90% of my students show up for each of my three-hour classes. Each class period, there are one or two students missing because of illness. Every semester, I have a few who habitually miss class, and they generally perform poorly on the weekly Friday quizzes and final exam that accounts for 70% of the course grade. Of course, they also lose a large chunk of the 25% of the course grade given for in-class activities, including lab exercises and collaborative problem-solving that they do in groups of three.
Teaching a 60-student studio-style introductory physics course is an intense experience. I have seven classroom hours scheduled per week (Six of them with my two graduate TA’s. The seventh is the quiz that I proctor myself.) My students take their quizzes at 9:20 am every Friday morning. With rare exceptions, the graded quizzes are returned to them shortly after 8:00 am during Monday morning’s class.
Given all of this, there is not much I can do for a student who misses a class or quiz. The studio model is built on collaboration within the groups of three students and the well-supported assertion that students generally learn better in groups than on their own. In principle, a student can perform the in-class assignments on their own and turn them in, but they are unlikely to learn nearly as much as they would have if they had worked on the same exercise with their groupmates in class. And of course rescheduling lab activities is pretty much impossible. The bottom line is that missing a class almost always negatively impacts a student’s learning.
Students who are going to be away from campus on quiz day, which is Friday, often ask if they can take the quiz early. But showing a quiz to a student a day or two before the class takes it seems like a terrible idea. As my mother taught me, “Once more than one person knows it, it’s not a secret anymore”. And allowing a student to take the quiz the following week after I’ve already returned the graded quizzes to the rest of the students is an equivalently bad idea.
If a student is going to be away for an official university activity, I offer to negotiate an arrangement with the faculty member accompanying the student to proctor the quiz wherever the student is on Friday. I send the quiz to the faculty member earlier in the week and the faculty member snaps a picture of the completed quiz with her or his cell phone and emails the picture to me. With this arrangement, I can even grade the quiz and return it with the other students’ quizzes on Monday morning. It is a bit of a hassle for the faculty member (or other academic advisor) accompanying the student, but it’s a hassle for me as well. I’m willing to share the responsibility and work involved with accommodating a student’s travel schedule with the faculty member or academic advisor accompanying the student. But I’m not willing to deal on my own with the train wreck that results if a student takes the quiz before Friday or the following week.
All of this is particularly relevant now because we seem to be experiencing a post-pandemic trend in which students, faculty and administrators are taking classwork less seriously than they did five years ago. Club and academic department advisors have always looked for activities on and off campus that they believed would engage and encourage their students. They used to recognize that they had a responsibility to assist their students in meeting the obligations associated with the classes that the students missed because of the activity. That attitude seems to have faded. Now if an advisor pulls a student out of class for an activity, the advisor generally believes it is entirely the class instructor’s responsibility to find a way to allow that student to make up any missed work. And that belief is increasingly backed up by the university administration.
If a course instructor is juggling increasing demands for classwork, quiz and exam make-ups from multiple students who are engaged in multiple activities, that instructor has two choices. First, the instructor can absorb the additional class workload and reduce the amount of effort she or he invests in the research and service activities that are a normal (and presumably valued) part of being a professor. Second, the instructor can reduce the amount of effort being invested in improving student learning to make room for the additional work required to provide make-up opportunities. For example, if weekly quizzes (which are intended to provide frequent timely feedback to students on their progress) generate too many demands for make-up opportunities, the instructor can simply fall back to a more traditional system in which students’ course grades are determined largely by one midterm exam and one final exam. Studio class periods that involve multiple in-class laboratory and collaborative problem-solving assignments can be replaced by traditional lectures. The impact on student learning would be dramatically negative, but these steps would eliminate much of the angst associated with missing classes for student activities.
Some of my K-12 colleagues tell me that academic policy changes like those underway at my university are already in full bloom in their schools. Perhaps the most pernicious such policy is the requirement that students can ask to retake exams or turn in assignments late. Students and their parents are taught in high school that there is no accountability for academic neglect and no reward for being a disciplined student, and they expect this to continue at the university level.
A recent New York Times article on the post-pandemic rise of K-12 absenteeism quotes a Duke University professor saying that during the pandemic “Our relationship with school became optional”. At my university (and probably at many others) we are careening toward a culture in which class is the place to go only if you have absolutely nothing else to do. Our leaders must realize that the classroom is the core of the university learning experience and halt that trend now.
Bridge to Tomorrow 