Dealing with Frustrating High School Experiences

Marian
Sat, 28 May 2016 16:10:54 +0000

The student is not being penalized for absences, as a matter of fact, attendance can not be used to solely reduce a grade of fail a student. @jrm815 pretty much summed up what is happening. The student absent is results in the student not being in class for participation purposes, if they have a “do now”, in class pop quiz, group work, classwork, in-class assignment or some sort of exit ticket, done at the end of the lesson and he is not there to be graded for that assignment.

In my opinion, this is splitting hairs. Yes, the student is not being directly penalized for absence, but the student is being penalized by being unavailable for something because of that absence. That’s close to the same thing.

I wonder whether there is a policy by which students who miss work (whether it’s participation or a pop quiz or something else) can make it up by doing a different kind of assignment. For example, when my kids were in school bands (which were credit courses with letter grades), participation in concerts was a required part of the course that counted toward the grade. However, if a student missed a concert because of illness or was unable to play because of an injury, the student could make up for it by preparing a written report on a topic related to music. Might there be similar policies school-wide to allow students to keep their grades up in spite of unavoidable absences?