Midterm Rosters
Midterm is rapidly approaching, and as I am asking my students to reflect on their own progress midway through, and assigning midterm grades for those in trouble, I am also reflecting on my own progress.
What is so tricky here is that attrition is really high. Retention is a problem here (not first-year so much, but 6-year grad rates are really low), so I feel like there is some pressure in these sophomore heavy classes to pay attention to in-class attrition. For both of my 200-level lit courses, attendance is about 65% of ennrollment (around 26 out of 40 students). we'll see how that stands up for the midterm exam, but still, there's an attendance policy, and people are dropping like flies.
Again, I am concerned with whose responsibility this is. Of course, the students are responsible for showing up; but there's a sense here that many students have not been equipped yet with a sense that they do have ownership of their education. So I take it as my responsibility in part to imbue my education about literature with an additional axis--that what I have for them is not knowledge, but rather the tools for them to lay claim to their knowledge, and high class drop-out rates tells me not that I'm supposed to be doing more work for them, but that the work I have been doing on my teaching has not entirely invested them with their own ownership.
Of course this is about a larger university culture than just my class--I've been told that these rates are entirely normal for this sort of class--but it doesn't mean that I'm not dismayed by it.
Comments
It's funny that you posted about this today - I was just talking to one of my colleagues about the fact that generally attendance at RCU is really, really good. Yes, there are always a few who don't show up, but all in all our students tend to be attenders.
That said, I think that students are more likely to blow off a class that they think is "easy" or that they think they don't "need" to attend. Many of my students tend to be surprised that they actually need to come to class to understand the reading. I know, shocking. At any rate, I find that in 200-level classes random reading quizzes do the trick for inspiring attendance in a way that the attendance policy alone does not.
And another thing: do you make a show of taking attendance every day? I notice that actually calling role periodically (once a week if not every class) helps.
Posted by: Dr. Crazy | October 10, 2005 3:46 PM
yeah, I make a show of taking attendance, and I do random reading quizzes. The thing is, we're not talking about students not coming to class once in a while; we're talking about a number of students just not coming to class at all. Like I can probably expect that of the 39 students enrolled in one of mysections, less than 30 will actually even take the midterm on Friday.
Posted by: RMC | October 10, 2005 9:04 PM
Ok, then my question is this: is this a new thing, or has it been going on since the beginning of the semester? If it's been going on since the beginning of the semester there should be a way for you just to drop students for non-attendance (something that's actually required by law so that students can't scam the government re: financial aid).
Posted by: Dr. Crazy | October 11, 2005 9:14 AM