Low-Attendance Classes Are Awesome. I Think.

This is something I think about and talk about face-to-face, in meatspace, with friends and colleagues a lot. But I've always been hesitant to post about it on the internet in fear that it will get a lot of those knee-jerk, judgmental responses the internet is so famous for. I've had a few good discussion arise from my blog posts lately, though, and very few heads have been bitten off. So I thought I'd try.

I take attendance when it's required that I do so by the school. Insofar as I'm allowed to formulate my own attendance policy, I have none. I make it clear to my students up front that a big portion of my class is discussion, participating and "meaning-making" in the classroom, on a day-to-day basis. If they choose not to show up for this, I don't directly penalize them, because I believe (and have seen after teaching over 1,000 students) that they are indirectly penalized and almost entirely across the board perform worse than students who have perfect or near-perfect attendance and participation.

Pudding, meat, etc.

For better or worse, this is generally my approach to teaching at a university: you, the student, are (nominally, at least) an adult, and you're free to make your decisions about attending class, about doing the work, about putting in the time, etc. I make my expectations clear up front, I make myself readily available to you if you want to do the work but don't maybe know how to do the work. Even if you don't know how to correctly want to do the work, I'm willing to help. But I'm hesitant to force students to put in a good effort because then it won't be a good effort...at least that's how it seems to me. This has been my approach for a long time, and I'm mostly happy with it, though sometimes I feel bad about not being more prescriptive, as in "Student A wouldn't have failed if I'd have forced him to turn in more drafts of his essay!" But that brings it's own set of problems, I suppose.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself frequently happy when I have a low-attendance day or week in class rather than frustrated (which seems to be the "normal" faculty reaction to such things). I think it's because it reinforces the implicit assumptions I'm making in my attendance policy as I've described it above: if the students who show up are choosing to show up, and their motivation for showing up is interest, if not in the subject matter then at least in GPA-based success, then a low-attendance day actually raises the percentage of interested students in the classroom.

As someone whose courses are dialogically-based 95% of the time, I'm all in favor of smaller class sizes as a rule, but even courses with a twenty-student cap are typically going to have around ten students who would just barely not rather be dead than be in my classroom. On the other hand, every single class session I've had where there were 30-40 students enrolled and only 3-4 showed up (something that happens depressingly frequently) have been absolutely brilliant class sessions.

There's a part of my brain that feels like I should feel guilty for thinking this, but I can't tell if it's a logical part, or the part that occasionally insists that we should give a trophy to every child, even if they come in last place, because trophies make people feel good and sad people are sad.