It was the typical faculty gripe-fest about students who don't value their time in class, who applaud when you let them out five minutes early and have multiple orgasms of joy when you have to cancel class, as if they don't realize that a cancelled class means they're getting less than they paid for, and so on and so on yadda yadda yadda, when someone came up with a brilliant idea: Maybe they'd value their time in class more if they had to pay in full up front.
Imagine how it would spice up the matriculation ceremony if students had to walk through the center of campus pushing wheelbarrows full of greenbacks! Or if students had to swipe a credit-card reader every time they came through the door of a classroom--think how cheated they'd feel if we let them out early!
I don't know how such a system would handle my student who comes in five minutes early, sets his backpack down on his chair, and then steps out to do whatever he does--phone call? cigarette break? rest room?--only to return to class three minutes after we've started. "I wasn't late," he insists, pointing to his backpack. (Maybe his backpack should get the credit for the work he's missed.)
2 comments:
I really, really dislike the whole "my backpack is here so I'm not late." I need to be stricter about enforcing tardies. I have so many kids who walk in with a minute left, drop their backpack, then ask to go to the bathroom. I keep meaning to make a big sign with my bathroom policy.
I hate even having an attendance policy, and I don't even bother in upper-level classes, where attendance tends to not be such a problem. However, we have a departmental attendance policy for first-year classes, including the rule that three tardies = one absence. I have a student who is two minutes late every single day, and no amount of cajoling or reminding or chiding will change that. Annoying.
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