A couple of weeks back, a student here at beautiful, scenic, Northern Kentucky University published a letter to the editor of our campus paper decrying any sort of attendance policy on campus. Yesterday's edition of the paper ran a response by me.

Nowadays, when faced with unapologetically absent students, I often find myself giving a mini-lecture on the subject, the key points of which more or less mirror the letter found above, and I figured that putting it into print might save me some precious time and breath over the next term or two. Notably, in the past, I didn't worry myself about such things. When I first started teaching, I never harassed students about attendance. If they didn't show it was their problem, and I figured it would almost certainly reflect in their final grade. And, in the vast majority of cases, it did.

I have, however, watched with some interest as I have become a bit more demanding about attendance every year. Part of this is because I have come to appreciate what public education means (especially as it gets less public every year), and also because I really hate to see students do poorly, and have seen the toll that the absence-ignorance-guilt-avoidance cycle takes on students who otherwise have no reason to do poorly in my classes. I guess in the end I would rather have them complain about attendance (which I calculate as part of the class participation grade) than about failing exams.