Teaching is a lifetime of learning to identify and reverse-engineer small moves that create significant ripple effects in students’ psyches. This is equally true for both academic and nonacademic lessons. And because these are so powerful, teachers love to share them whenever they find them.
Here’s one I heard recently:
“I figured out how to get kids to class on time.”
“What’s your secret?”
“I announced that I only take attendance once per class. If you’re late, you’ll have to pick up an attendance correction form from the main office, fill it out, get my signature, and bring it back to the attendance office.”
A hush fell over the math office. There were murmurs of approval.
“I’m totally stealing that.”
“That’s a genius move.” We all nodded in agreement.
I appreciated this strategy because it’s so seamlessly aligned with our school culture and our school community’s values. Having strong attendance is the default assumption for most of our families. Students don’t generally ditch classes. So being marked “absent” on a day when you were known to be at school is a problem for most kids, because your parents are definitely going to notice it and ask you about it.
Of course, our school has a strong and straightforward solution for cleaning up attendance errors, but it comes with a hitch. It requires the student to visit the main office to pick up the attendance correction form. They have to fill it out, get their teacher’s signature confirming that they were indeed present in class that day, and return the signed form to the attendance office.
This is a bit of a headache, but it’s something I believe the Rube Goldberg Lowell Class of 1900 would appreciate.
That’s because Lowell has a 26-acre campus, and the attendance office is located in the geographic center of the campus. This requires two extra trips to the main office, not to mention the energy required for the additional conversations with your parents. But if you were late to class, that’s what needs to be done — every time.
I jumped on this bandwagon last week, and I’m never going back. In my morning classes, we have gone from 10 kids late in every class to two. That’s earned us back five minutes of lost instructional time each day, but even that’s not the most important thing.
Indulging student lateness over the energies of the rest of the class isn’t consistent with the values we need to be teaching our students about time management and self-management.
The most important thing is that this aligns my instructional priorities about how I’m serving students and about what we value about teaching and learning in my classroom.
Don’t get me wrong – I will happily correct attendance for any student with an error. Attendance is a legal document. As a teacher, I have a legal obligation to record what I see. Attendance is how California schools get school funding. Everybody wants our attendance records to be correct.
But indulging late students’ lateness over the energies of the rest of the class isn’t consistent with the values we need to be teaching our students about time management and self-management.
At a developmental level for teenagers, student lateness reflects a mistaken understanding about its impact on those around them. As Piaget and Adler have shown, children grow by taking action based on mistaken interpretations about their experiences. A high school student who consistently arrives late to school without facing any consequences comes to believe that their lateness doesn’t actually matter. They come to think that everyone around them will immediately drop whatever they are doing to accommodate them. Oh sure, there might be some grumbling or even yelling, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the child has “won” this round of life and the adult has “lost.”
Putting it into these terms for myself was a real wake-up call.
Since I stopped prioritizing the lateness of students over the promptness of those who got to class on time, attendance patterns have started shifting. We’ve gone from having a few late kids who daily hijack the learning environment for everyone to a new structure where late students recognize that they are only inconveniencing themselves. This is a valuable learning opportunity, and it’s the appropriate place for the inconvenience to be located. And as students internalize this experience, they are learning one of the lessons they need to understand to launch successfully into adulthood — namely, that being on time has value in adult society, and is ultimately far less inconvenient than being late.
This lesson is being learned without anybody in the room being disrespected, yelled at, or punished. It preserves harmony and mutual respect, and kids are increasing their available energy for learning because more of them are getting to class on time.
And I discovered a secondary set of lessons from this the other day. A student knocked on the door while I was eating lunch and prepping lessons.
“Did I leave my signed attendance form in here? I thought it was in my backpack after you signed it, but now I can’t find it anywhere.”
I remembered signing the form earlier and tucking it into her backpack while she was working.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
We checked the floor, my desk, the recycling bin, the lost and found.
No luck.
“It’s O.K.,” I said. “You can always pick up another copy.”
