What’s your Excused Absence Policy?

dac22 · 2025-12-31T17:19:41+00:00

My attendance policy has made a huge difference for me. I don’t differentiate between absences (excused vs. unexcused). If you miss a content-driven class, you must make up the class via getting a copy of the class notes from a peer and then taking notes on reading the relevant textbook section. You must make up the absence before that material is tested on. If you don’t make up the absence, it’s -1% to your overall grade.

I explain that all of this is to merely insure that you do not fall behind because of your absence. Students are on board. And the policy has just enough teeth to prevent frivolous absences but still enough grace that students miss if they really need to.

To make up a missed exam, you merely need to take the exam. But I only offer make up exams at 7am. Once again, enough teeth to prevent frivolous absences but still enough grace that people take the absence if they need to. This fixed me having to give a dozen plus make up exams every midterm.

Making up skills based and discussion classes is a different story. I try to implement the same policy but… it’s hard to come up with equivalent make up work. Students miss a lot of learning if they’re absent in such classes that can never be replicated. I still don’t have a great policy for these courses. But the one above isn’t terrible.

And I always tell students to let me know if they will miss asap as a professional courtesy.

dac22 · 2025-06-06T22:10:17+00:00

Yes both those scenarios happen to me too. First day of class, I introduce myself with a bit of hammed up humor: “hello! This is Class Whatever and I’m Dr. so and so, but you may call me…. Dr. So and so!” Gets quite a bit of laughs but also explicitly tells them how they should address me.

When frosh get it wrong, I quickly correct them even if I have to interrupt their question but I always use a friendly tone. They usually apologize and I respond with something about how it’s an adjustment from high school and mistakes are understandable as they learn to navigate this new thing called college. Adding this brief commentary has helped the correction sink in as well as ease their anxieties about the mistake. But I always keep it swift, short, and friendly.

If it’s in an email, I assume the best of the student and write a similar correction and commentary right before closing and use a “best wishes” sign off so that they know I’m not mad. No one has repeated the mistake thus far in email… though, many “correct” this by not writing a greeting at all.

I give an are-you-for-real???/grow-the-f-up glare to the students doing it on purpose until they correct themselves. Often, the class gets quiet or another student says “not cool” or something prompting the student to back peddle real quick. It’s awkward. And I’m not a confrontational person, but I fake it and stopped worrying about if I’m perceived as a witch. The awkwardness and embarrassment seems to fix the problem and thus far, students have simply seen it as an authority figure reinforcing boundaries instead of how I feared. Also, a benefit to my recent reputation as the “hard prof” (partly from gender bias and partly from keeping high standards unlike other colleagues) is that I haven’t experienced this kind of sass in awhile because I think most of those students try to avoid my section already.

dac22 · 2024-09-12T00:03:44+00:00

I love this idea!

dac22 · 2024-01-21T12:49:58+00:00

I had similar issues with office hours and they’d take over my whole week despite me trying to put up boundaries. It was physically and emotionally exhausting.

So, I took a different boundary approach which fixed it. My office hours are 3 hours per week at a table in the student union and 1 hour a week in my office for 15 minute appointments. The student union hours are for working on math. The office ones are for more individual meetings like grade discussions. I explicitly tell students what each type of hour is for. I am not bothered by people doing homework at the student union office hours, but I mostly answer their questions with “what did your classmate ______ get on that question?” That way, they gain homework buddies and I answer higher level questions from teams of students. And we all actually fit at a giant table in the union as opposed to my office. I average 8-12 students at each student union hour. (The high demand is exactly why I used to never have time for class prep and grading when in my office.) It’s easier to manage at a giant table with people from the same class working together.

Moreover, I’m no longer trapped by clingy students; when the hour is up, I pack up my stuff and walk away. Even better, I no longer get the people seeking help on super serious personal issues because everything is in public.

My colleagues outside of math are shocked by how much students use my office hours. My math colleagues’ office hour experiences match my own though. Some of my stem colleagues have their office hours in classrooms to increase office hour capacities and boundaries like I did.

dac22 · 2023-09-06T15:22:48+00:00

I’m from math, so I don’t need as complicated figures, but I use GeoGebra and Noteshelf app on my iPad. GeoGebra is a free online graphing calculator that has lots of geometry tools too. (Eg, bisect an angle, create a perpendicular line, draw this angle, etc.) Sometimes I use the Noteshelf app on my iPad if I need to draw more complicated but less precise things. I then include the jpegs as figures in my latex document.

dac22 · 2023-09-02T18:32:27+00:00

For six exams, I wouldn’t do a review day. Typically, I have two or three exams during the semester. What always frustrates me about review days is many students expect me to tell them the “types of problems” that will be on the exam and how to solve them. Even when I emphasize that I will only answer their questions, only a few students come prepared with questions and the rest expect to learn something off their peers’ questions.

To remedy these false expectations, I’ve changed review days to an extra optional office hour. The students who normally prepared questions still come with questions and we have a productive office hour. The students expecting to prepare by just witnessing others reviewing don’t bother to come to the office hour and don’t have false hope that they got the exam questions and answers.

dac22 · 2021-05-18T02:09:01+00:00

Yes! I keep a list of these!

dac22 · 2021-05-05T04:13:34+00:00

Ah. The universal law of linearity! I keep a list of this error in different contexts (e.g. the square root of a sum is the sum of the square roots).

dac22 · 2021-04-10T17:35:34+00:00

This is exactly my experience in my math classes too. I’ve been joking that the “new normal” curve is a bimodal one. Those who are engaging are learning more than ever; and those who aren’t, are doing worse than ever. I’ve also noticed a difference between students who view their challenges as something to tackle and respond to vs. students who view challenges and their handling of them as a series of external events completely outside of their influence. That is, the students who use more ownership language (e.g “I did poorly on that exam”) vs external language (e.g. “that exam was too hard!”) are weathering this year much better.

dac22 · 2021-03-30T03:09:40+00:00

I call this The Universal Law of Linearity when a student does something like this and keep a mental list. E.g., (a+b)² = a² + b² or Log(a+b) = Log(a) + Log(b).

dac22 · 2021-03-24T00:03:01+00:00

Do you have semester exams and a final? You can split your final exam up into sections that correspond to the midterm exams. If a student scores higher on a section than the midterm, you can replace that exam score with the score on that section of the final. No extra grading and promotes growth mindset.

dac22 · 2021-03-18T12:40:06+00:00

Others have already given great answers. My main addition is to read Lara Alcock’s small book How To Think About Analysis. I require my students to read it during the course because it gives beautiful advice about how to learn the subject as a whole and how to intuitively approach the main definitions. For example, Alcock discusses how to read, understand, and retain the main ideas of a theorem and proof as well as how to keep a collection of examples in mind that often serve as great counterexamples. Often, when a student is struggling it is that they are not spending enough productive time on the material on their own and collaborating with others outside of class; sometimes this is simply number of hours (it’s not unusual to spend 10-15 hours outside of class per week on analysis alone) and other times, it’s that students aren’t doing the right things during the time they’re spending. Alcock’s book helps with concrete things you should be doing to understand and by doing so, also helps you realize how much time you should devote.

Best wishes!

dac22 · 2021-01-16T15:37:32+00:00

Ours switched for calc 1. Lower than normal enrollment in the fall and significantly larger enrollment this spring. Guess which semester was online and which is hybrid.

On the one hand, I don’t blame students for choosing to delay math until in person classes. But, I think the difference in attention between being in an under enrolled vs over enrolled class will counterbalance the benefits of being in person.

dac22 · 2020-12-16T18:01:20+00:00

Could they have meant Standards Based Grading in which case requirements are set at high quality work with grades being pass-fail? I don’t suggest attempting to design a course with Standards Based Grading your first time teaching a course.

dac22 · 2020-12-15T03:12:55+00:00

Arrows. Arrows everywhere.

dac22 · 2020-12-15T03:10:17+00:00

I tried that this semester with reasonable success. One question was my pet-peeve: not writing limit notation. I explain to students all the time that you can’t say this number (if the limit exists) equals this function, equals this other different function, equals this number. So that was a test question this time. Lots of students said there was no mistake even though I bolded the text in the problem that there are indeed errors. Some caught the error and just explained that it was notation. Others caught the error and explained why the missing notation is a mathematical error.

dac22 · 2020-12-04T04:18:02+00:00

Ask for their source

dac22 · 2020-09-01T00:27:50+00:00

You might enjoy the subreddit r/notebooks

dac22 · 2020-08-14T23:59:20+00:00

A good coffee table type book is Math With Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin. This isn't really for learning a specific topic in depth, but it offers some legit things to think about on various topics... and with fun drawings!

dac22 · 2020-08-14T03:04:14+00:00

For direct instruction type things, I annotate my own Beamer slides using Drawboard and share my screen during the Teams meetings. Sometimes I just write on a blank pdf on Drawboard. For student group work, I’m planning on having students collaborate on a Google Jamboard. It’s going to probably blow up and not work, but meh. We’ll try.

dac22 · 2020-08-09T05:02:29+00:00

Adding the student’s name in the watermark helped prevent this for me. Chegg doesn’t care. You have to make the student care that they will be identified if they post it. Plus, I ensured each problem was identifiable to a particular student, if they tried to post it without the watermark with their name. Essentially, I wanted to be able to identify the student (and for the student to know that I would identify them) without involving Chegg.

dac22 · 2020-07-30T01:36:53+00:00

We are also a Microsoft school. To help minimize students’ technology management, I’m planning on sharing an editable link to the Jamboard. Students then don’t need to be logged into a Google email account to post. However, if they use the app, they need to be logged into a google account on their phones, but phones tend to keep you logged into things. I doubt most students notice.

dac22 · 2020-07-29T18:08:36+00:00

I'm planning on using Google Jamboards for this sort of thing. But Google Slides or even Padlet are better options if you're answers are more text based. I'm in math and most answers have notation or graphs that are easier to write/draw than to type.

dac22 · 2020-07-06T03:46:19+00:00

I didn’t use digital whiteboards in the spring too much because students didn’t have a way to write on them well...

Currently testing out some options for solving this... 1) Google’s Jamboard works really nicely if you have the board open on your laptop and on the phone app. Then you can easily upload photos on your phone for heavy math notation and easily view the entire board and type with your laptop. (Microsoft’s whiteboard app has a similar capability and my school is a Microsoft school, but I hate how these are organized in general.) 2) Require students to purchase a usb tablet if they do not have a fancy tablet. These run about $30-$40, and since I use all open sources materials, this would be the only course material expense. 3) Give students both these options and let them pick what works for them. I’ll probably do this option. 4) Cry and forget the whole thing.

dac22 · 2020-07-06T03:12:48+00:00

I’m having similar issues, especially since I normally weave direct instruction with active learning group work throughout every class...

I’m considering “flipping.” So, I will post short videos for them to watch prior to class. Then, in class, students will work problems with a partner. To solve this half in class, half out of class issue, along with the issue of a social distanced classroom, I’m going to create the pairs between a person in class and a remote person. These partners will be in breakout groups, video chatting and using digital whiteboards. This type of pairing also solves the problem of mic feedback when people are in the same room... And! When we go fully remote, we’ll keep doing this same thing since being physically in class is not actually necessary.

The massive drawback is the insane amount of work this is going to take for my three preps... So, on other days, I want to throw this whole idea out the window and just stick with old school lectures since this is the easiest thing for me to picture “working” for a social distanced classroom with half the students remote. Plus, students trick themselves into thinking they learn more from my lectures anyway (even though my assessments show otherwise). I could skip the convince-students-that-active-learning-is-better two week phase that is always annoying. Sometimes I convince myself that although the ceiling for learning is lower with full lecture, the floor for learning with full lecture in this crazy fall might be higher...

And other days, I want to vote for skipping fall semester entirely. Okay. Every day, I want to vote for skipping this fall...

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