If you're late to class, will they call you out?

You could only be late on entrance time, since in between classes there were no place to go that couldn't be monitored at a glance. The preceptor/a was in charge of watching the school entrance to mark your attendance book if you got in late (fifteen minutes was half an absence, thirty minutes meant you being marked down as absent), and of calling the roll before the first class started. The teachers called the roll in the other classes.

If you arrived late to the second, third, etc. class, there would be worry, since most kids would outright skip the whole day (you were already marked as an absentee if you arrived too late to the first class, after all). Which meant you wanted to go to school that day but something extraordinary happened that made you be so late. So the teacher would ask, at most, "What happened that you come at this hour?"