MIA

This morning's class meeting held some surprises for me: the good one was the *excellent* activity our facilitators devised for discussing Jane Austen's "Love and Freindship" (a parody Austen wrote at age 15!). They had pairs of students write *response* letters to Laura, imagining what Marianne might write. Most of the young women students were *really accurate* in their Marianne voices: a pleasure.

The not-so-good surprise had to do with the presence of three students who haven't been to class in a l...o...n...g time:

• One had only attended the first day, May 26, and has missed the last five class meetings (out of 17 total meetings).
• One emailed me yesterday to say she'd had strep throat AND had just moved (ahem) to explain why she's missed the last three classes. I read and responded to that email yesterday afternoon.
• One emailed me last night at 1:00 a.m. to say she'd been in Chicago (her brother was injured and her parents, who are on vacation in France, asked her to go check on him) to explain why she's missed the last four classes. I read that email after class this morning.

Now I'm not quite sure what to do. I thought they'd all dropped! None of them has posted on the class discussion board. They don't seem to have read the attendance policy for our course, and when they asked about it, I couldn't remember the nitty-gritty details myself (I tweak my policies for every course, depending upon the time-frame and subject matter, but the overall idea is that I allow a certain number of absences for any reason before consequences kick in).

Evidently, my attendance policy this summer semester (for a six-week course that's supposed to be the equivalent of a sixteen-week semester) isn't clear -- here's what the syllabus says [emphasis in original]:

"You can earn up to ten (10) attendance points per face-to-face class period, which I determine based on your attendance and participation, for a total of 170 possible points. If you must miss a face-to-face class meeting, you can recoup some of those lost points by contributing a substantial discussion board posting within 24 hours for the class period you missed (by 8:00 a.m. on the day after the missed class). This posting can earn you up to five (5) points. Missing two class periods without posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop by one whole grade. Missing four or more classes without posting to the discussion board will result in an automatic F grade for the course. Missing four or more classes even with posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop one whole grade."

I suppose all that is confusing when you look at it in a big block of prose like that -- I should format the information in a box/chart/table or something. But the numbers seem pretty clear to me, and we note this paragraph on our first day of class when we review the course policies.

Also, I guess it's just fine for students to attend a course that they've already earned an F in . . . some learning can still take place (not that taking a class has anything to do with learning for most summer students -- ouch, I'm cynical!). But most of the students said they were taking this summer literature course because it "was cheaper" (two students are earning master's degrees at two of our local private colleges, and this 200-level community college literature course somehow fulfills requirements for them!).

Hmmm. Thoughts?