How to Handle Student Excuses

I just replied to a ProfHacker post. I liked what I said so much, I decided to publish it here.


I teach at a community college, so very few of my students travel to Europe or say they can buy me. On the other hand, I do have students email me the first day of classes and say they will not be able to attend for the first several weeks because of __________________ .

I feel great annoyance at communications like that. However, I calmly tell the students that everything we will be doing - I teach math - all the topics we will cover and all the work they will be responsible for are on the syllabus and on the Internet. I tell them to make sure to take their laptops with them, and I will see them whenever.

Secretly, I know these students will probably flunk or withdraw, and I just let the bad feelings go. After all, there is nothing I can do to control anyone, especially people who are (technically) adults. We do not have a Math SWAT Team to send after errant students. They will flunk or withdraw and hopefully learn something from the experience.

At least, I pray, let them register with another math prof next semester.

Unfortunately, in these times of stressed budgets, the entitled students (who do incredibly stupid things) will only add to our attrition rate, thus giving the state legislature that much more ammunition to use against us.

Today, I held a calculator workshop for my 9:00 AM Intermediate Algebra students. I covered the basics and gave them activities to model. Then, I covered graphing rational functions, finding the function value, and finding the point of intersection.

Response was mostly positive although most of the students appeared to feel insecure about using graphing calculators. For that reason, I attempted to be (and was) very cheerful, entertaining and optimistic.

I gave students an assignment that would be graded as homework: I asked them to email me from My NWACC Connection. I did this for two purposes: 1) to make sure students' email was working properly and 2) to increase the probability that students will repeat their email contact should they need help.