With my class exam drawing neigh, suddenly attendance issues and all other matters are cropping up. My class is pretty small and I already have 20% of the students as possible no-shows for the exam. Sports, deaths, illnesses... everyone has some reason that they may not on Tuesday, be able to get to the same classroom they have been getting to every Tuesday prior.
I will readily admit that creating all of the lectures and class exercises is tapping my will to live at the moment, but this kind of stuff is really testing me. I'm barely keeping everything together dealing with what and how to teach these kids and now there's rescheduling, possible make-up exams, medical notes, etc., etc. I'm not in any way saying that people can't have legit excuses for missing class, just that the amount of extra work for students that do can be huge. And, the oft stated tenet that there is a close association between major illness and exams is certainly ringing true.
At this point I can only hope that I don't end up getting really sick, because I don't know how much further I can fall behind on some critical things in my research and home life right now.
5 hours ago
Be sure to make it clear to the little bastards how much work this is for you, and how much extra work is involved rescheduling things. I bet they have no clue about you needing to do 95% of anything. "Oh, he'll just give me the exam another day."
ReplyDeleteOn the theme of sudden, inexplicable family illnesses at exam time, a chum of mine was hoisted in front of the Dean of Students as a freshman because he used the "dead grandma" excuse 4 times for different events/exams during a semseter. Someone talked to someone who did the math...
Do you have multiple midterms? If so, I would just drop everyone's lowest midterm mark. If you can't make an exam, you get a zero. But it will get dropped, so no biggie. If you make it to all midterms, then you get the opportunity to up the score.
ReplyDelete20% are prescheduling deaths and illnesses?
ReplyDeleteAs for sport I had to be representing a country on a different continent to have the balls to ask for an alternate test. And they still said tough shit.
-antipodean