I have a big lecture. The front 3rd of the room is great - they are great and they are doing great - everything is as it should be with them. The back 3rd is a bunch of jerks (yeah, touchy-feely love-the-students Wombat has a couple dozen jerks in her lecture). They're jerks - they are failing - everything is as it should be with them. It's the middle 3rd. The middle of the room is nice kids trying hard but they are distracted by the jerks in the back. The jerks show up for the attendance quiz. They don't get that they wouldn't need that 5% of their grade if they weren't a bunch of jerks who don't know what the fuck is going on. So they show up and do their jerk thing for their 5 points.
I'm seriously thinking of "forgetting" the attendance quizzes and announcing, "oops, my bad I don't have an attendance quiz today" at the start of every class from now on so they'll just fucking leave out the back as soon as I turn around.
If you were my chair and you were really gung-ho about mandatory attendance, what would I have to tell you to not get fired after I flagrantly failed to comply with mandatory attendance down the homestretch?
-WotC
I would be doing the same thing so I would wink back when you winked.
ReplyDeleteSeriously this is a terrible and useless nuisance.
Used to be that military academies and some elite prep schools made it mandatory to make attendance mandatory. Not just places with lots of at-risk and low-SES students. It seems to work well in some situations, but not in others. And the reasons for implementing could be complex? But I get your point, WotC. It sounds like your situation is rotten. Mandatory attendance at an open-admissions school would be a nightmare and a very very very good reason to also have mandatory bourbon.
ReplyDeleteIs your class an hour and twenty minutes? If so, you could justify instituting a three-minute break at the twenty-minute mark. That way, you could do the quiz in the first 20 minutes, and then the jerks would have a great opportunity to disappear before the last fifty-seven minutes. Hence, plausible deniability.
And maybe you could get the ball rolling on eliminating that attendance policy. It could just be an insane vestige from who-knows-what. Your chair might hate it as much as you do.
But if the chair is really gung-ho about mandatory attendance, then prepare two envelopes.
I used to make sure that they knew when the unannounced quiz was. And then I had it right at the beginning of the lecture so that the uninterested could leave. Would leave me with a dozen or so students who were a joy to teach.
DeleteThat mandatory quiz sounds like such a waste of time. I like Bubba's idea, with the addition of using the 20 minutes for one-on-one conferences. You could do two a day, excusing the students you conference with from the quiz. I can envision ways this might work.
ReplyDeleteoooh the break would work.... I accidentally discovered there's a document camera under the podium. I've been using personally edited versions of the dreadful PPTs that came with the book - but I hate it because 1) I always miss something dreadful and 2) I just really prefer teaching with chalk. But the board in my room is a piece of crap and no one can read it after the first thing gets erased.
ReplyDeleteI can do some of the PPT and then take a "break" to switch over to the document camera. Then they'll only be disruptive over the crappy PPTs anyway (by the way - the materials were authored by various people within the department. The book is ok - the PPTs were made by a different faculty member and I swear to god you'd have had to be on HEAVY drugs to make these bizarre pieces of crap - but it's hard to say "I know the board is really bad, but I REALLY don't want to use those PPTs..." when she's always skulking her tenured ass around within ear-shot and my job isn't even TT. So I severely edit them and hope for the best).
They'll know the quiz is over when I put my laptop away (it's an audience response thing kind of like clickers but phone based - yeah - that's another thing - but at least if they can play with their fucking phones, they won't talk, so there's a silver lining).
I'm a broken record on some of these issues. Most of these initiatives about making professors responsible for student behavior has stopped part of the good college can do. I don't believe missing some classes should derail a student's entire path, but it does not hurt for some consequences to be levied to help students understand their real part in their OWN FUCKING EDUCATION.
ReplyDeleteWhen they don't come and the pressure is on the professor, well, that's just wrong.
Yeah, give the "unannounced" quiz at the same time
ReplyDelete(early on), then declare a 5 minute break. Say nothing to those who disappear afterwards.