Whereas my MA students rarely skip classes and only do so for justified reasons, I cannot make sense of the attendance pattern in my BA class. There are 63 students officially registered, of whom 58 appear to be following the course according to the exercises handed in and our online activities. However, classroom attendance varies between 20-30 on Wednesdays and 12-20 on Fridays. I have never seen the 58 students together in class and, what is more, leaving the dozen students who attend regularly, the rest come and go. It is the first time in my 31 years as a teacher that I’m already past mid-semester and I cannot recognize most of my students. I’m concerned to the point that I have asked my Department this morning to start an official investigation as I know for sure this is not a personal problem but a trend.
In my university attendance is not compulsory but it is expected, as I have told my students again and again (through posts in the Moodle classroom forum and emails since I don’t see them in class). I do not know why attendance is not compulsory, but I believe it has something to do with students being responsible adults above 18. For teachers, attendance is absolutely compulsory. The school (or Facultat) keeps track by having us sign up an online app in the classroom computer. Absences need to be justified and permission to attend an academic activity (conference and so on) applied for weeks in advance. Other schools in my university appear to be more lax, but mine discovered some twelve years ago that one of the teachers had skipped the whole semester after offering to grant a pass grade to all his students; one who disagreed because they wanted an A reported him to the Dean. Since then we all sign up for attendance. Students don’t.
I started keeping track of attendance in 2009, when we started the new degrees because I invited students to self-assess for class participation (10% of the final mark) and, as I explained to them, I had to be able to check whether they had been in class at all. This worked well until it didn’t. One semester about five or six years ago I found myself with a class full of students who clearly didn’t want to be there and who were only present because they needed to sign the attendance sheet. Three of them spent the 75 minutes of every one of my lectures hiding behind their laptops chatting quite loudly about God knows what, and I decided then that I would never check attendance again. Let the ones interested come to class and the others stay away.
I was myself a working student who often skipped classes because of my jobs, but I always made the point of explaining to my teachers my situation and worked out with them a system of autonomous study to compensate for my absence. On the other hand, some of my peers were famous for spending their whole degrees at the bar, some playing endless card games. They would cram hard one week before the final exams and most managed to pass. What puzzles me today is that the absences go unexplained and do not have a regular pattern. Some students email me to warn that they are going to miss a class, but most just don’t bother. They just show up or not. I came up with the idea of having everyone participate in class discussion with a small compulsory activity but although the sessions go reasonably well and students’ contributions are great, this has not increased their presence. I have now in class the habitual dozen and the students who need to participate on that day. The rest stay away. The students’ absence on Friday morning, I’m told, mostly corresponds to the fact that they go partying on Thursday, seems many go home on Friday for the weekend, but I have no idea what seems to be the problem on Wednesday.
I would not be writing about all this if it weren’t because it is creating two noticeable problems. On the one hand, I find myself clarifying through the class delegate instructions I have given in the classroom that could not be clarified in person because the students were not there. I also leave my instructions on the weekly notes of my Moodle classroom, and send emails (including reminders of when students must be in class for presentations) but there is no way I can go through the calendar or the syllabus with all the students and solve doubts. Of course, missing lectures means that they are necessarily learning less, unless the Covid-19 lockdown turned them into extremely independent learners who need no classroom activities.
The other main problem is that I am getting depressed day by day. My class fits about 80 students, which means that it looks very empty with an attendance below 40, and just miserably empty with just 15 to 20 students. The students in the classroom appear to listen to me, but I see some using the cell phone all the time and attention wavers even among those apparently listening hard. In the last few weeks I have stopped my ranting to ask whether anyone is interested. They have reassured me that they are indeed but I get this uneasy feeling that, as I told them last week, I’m just having a conversation with myself (this is fine, but I could have it at home, as I’m doing now). Strangely enough, the presence of the ones who are in the classroom weighs less than the absence of the rest because I feel that their absence is a criticism of my methods. Perhaps I bore them, or perhaps they feel assessment is too light and they can manage at home, or perhaps they just don’t like Literature. I know very well that Literature teachers are dinosaurs past their sell-by date but it’s getting to the point when I am beginning to believe that what I teach does not matter and this is starting to undermine my performance.
Something might be afoot, however, beyond my classroom. I read a couple of days ago an article in The Guardian titled “Rise in school absences since Covid driven by anxiety and lack of support, say English councils”. Apparently, absences among English schoolchildren were “in the spring term were still 50% higher than before the pandemic”. The causes are “increased anxiety and lack of mental health support”, and the difficulties felt by families and children to adapt to constant public presence after Covid-19. English parents, it appears, are now more permissive and allow children, who are only mildly sick or not sick at all, to stay home. All this refers to young children, but my suspicion is that something similar is happening among university students who, besides, are not supervised by parents. Another possibility, as one of my regular attendees suggests, is that students who skip class just fail to understand how expensive fees are for their parents and for society as a whole.
So, why do I want students to attend my lectures? After all, I’m paid the same money, what do I care? For many reasons. I like to know the persons whose work I grade, as I dislike anonymity in education. My students are funding (a sixth of) my salary and I feel that I work for them; they are not my clients but the persons whose education justify all the hard work I have done to get tenure. If students reject my teaching, that effort feels superfluous and this is when depression sets in. Another reason is that performance of any type is enhanced by audience response, and although I could work well with a tiny class in a tiny classroom, small attendance in a big classroom means that I don’t get enough feedback, or support, to feel confident. I stutter and stammer. Every teacher gets a boost if students listen attentively, and the more students listen attentively the bigger the boost. I’ll regret my words when I get again a class of sixty bored students, but students seem to forget that we are not machines. Perhaps when AIs replace us they will miss us.
Every university teacher’s dream is walking into a classroom full of totally engaged students eager to participate in class discussion, just like every married person’s dream is enjoying one romantic day after the other. I know that an enthusiastic class totally loving English Literature is a chimera (I had that once ten years ago in my Harry Potter course but I will never have it again, not even with Potter), but I would settle for regular attendance of 80% of the class, showing at least some polite interest if only because they are paying to be educated by me and my colleagues.
Or let’s begin an open conversation about what causes the absences, with hopefully some empathy for teachers’ own anxiety in the face of how education is gradually collapsing to a great extent because studying are losing interest (or not showing it). Time to talk.