Late management at school
This morning I got to read this article: It’s called “management” and the referring article on what is management regarding rules creation and problems in a company.
The article correctly suggest that a company should treat it’s employee’s as “adults” and not make policys or rules for every encountered problem or even possible problems. Instead it is good management to expect employee’s to be responsible and deal on each problematic case with the interested persons. I learned this lesson a little bit the hard way many years ago when I was working for a big international company. My supervisor asked me to take care of some personal things for him and clueless like I was, I did it and spend to much of my work time on it. My boss saw that and called me in for an interview. It was not easy to accept the reprimand but it was a good lesson learn for myself and I also appreciate he didn’t make it very public and allowed me to change and do things better.
Now I’m struggling with student tardiness in my classes. It’s becoming a distraction for my students and myself because when class is suppose to start only half the class is present and the other half is arriving in the next 15 min disturbing everybody and missing some of my teachings. At the beginning of the semester I told the students that after two absences or tardies I will dock a letter point from their final grade for any additional absence or tardy. If I were to do that a lot of the class would be currently failing the class no matter the work they put in so I don’t think it was a good solution. Instead a part of their final grade will take into account how much a students was absent or late. But lately I decided to give some very easy pop quiz’s to those on time in class so they get even more points. When doing it for a few days in a row it proved to be effective but I doubt it will work as a long term solution. I don’t have any ideas on how to solve this issue, I encouraged them to be on time, the university president is doing the same on a larger scale, I provided them with some grade incentive but they don’t behave like adults and I can’t really “fire” them. Because of the number of people, I can’t really have one on one interviews and when I had them, they didn’t seem too effective.
If you have any insights or ideas, please let me know.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Glad you found my post (and Jay’s) helpful, Jeremy.
Sounds to me like you’re doing the right things. I would keep up the pace with the quizzes, and even make it an inside joke with the on-time students that you’re basically handing out free points to those who are acting like grown-ups. In other words, you can try to recruit the on-time students to put pressure on the tardy students.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Tim, the tanks a lot for the comment. The free points were effective because I got my classes back into coming on time. Of sourse, as usual 1 or 2 student are always late but I had personal interview with them and it didn’t change anything. I’m trying to have on time student put pressure on those late and they have the leverage because of the points I’m giving them.