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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

> Forced attendance is imo the worst symptom of this

I taught in an inner city title one school. While it would have made teaching those who showed up easier, I'd bet that over half the students would not show up without forced attendance. We had under 2% of students who would go on to graduate a four year college and something like an 80% transitory rate (meaning 20% would complete all four years at the school - this might have been up to 95% transitory, it has been a while since I was there). Gangs, violence, and poverty and no examples of school helping anyone in their lives.

What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?

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I think most of the people here (myself included) only have experience teaching at a university level (since it is a website for tech professionals, most of us only have teaching experience in grad school or as professors). So the scenario is just totally different. Mandatory attendance doesn’t make sense for adults that are supposed to be trusted to make their own decision and who are paying lots of money to be there (If people don’t show up to my discussion section, it is a sign I’m failing paying customers, and I need to sort that out, so forcing them to attend will destroy my measurement).

If you are teaching k-12 and especially if some of the kids have a rough situation outside of the school, at least mandatory attendance puts them in an environment insulated from those outside pressures.

Oh, first of all, I truly respect this kind of teaching work. My only experience is in graduate or post-graduate level teaching. So really don't what is ideal in your situation.

fwiw I've never heard of forced attendance post secondary; attendance is a legal requirement in k-12.

Some classes have an attendance requirement, but usually that's set by the department or the individual instructor.

In Spain it became common after the last university reform, about 15 years ago. IMO it's counterproductive. If a student doesn't want to go to class and you force them, they probably won't be paying attention but just wasting time with social networks or whatever other distraction, and they can even distract those that want to attend. And I don't even feel morally justified to tell them to stop wasting time (as long as they're silent, at least) if they're forced to be there.

You can force a student to be in class, you can't force them to care about class.

Forced attendance would work if students cared for their education but their parents didn't. That's just not the case, even if students don't care because their parents don't, it just doesn't fix the problem.

From experience, in the last 5-10 years most lecturers won't care if you go to classes or no. The will only require you to do continuous evaluation tasks.

Edit: Change "won't" to "don't", and "The will" to "They"

I’ve taken and assisted for classes that had “mandatory” attendance. In the sense that missing classes would come out of your grade.

Sometimes it was implemented as a direct role-call. Some classes have a “participation” component which is really just a fuzzy attendance grade. Some classes have random graded in-class quizzes, which also function as a stochastic attendance check.

Generally I hate all of these things IMO low attendance is the instructor’s last, most dramatic barometer to indicate poor instruction, and subverting this measurement is a terrible idea. But it is definitely different for k-12!

Get them into trades that can make them money right now rather than calling textbooks & college the OnlyWay™?

Err, wrong. We must feed the industrial debt complex.

Even with trades you need to know how to read, write and do basic math (and honestly algebra). Kids who don't show up likely haven't hopped that hurdle and are unfit even for trades. There is a disconnect where kids dont understand that classes are often not about the class but some underlying skill you're practicing via something they consider worthless.

It's a waste for schools to put an unprepared kid in a trade class only for them to realize oh. They actually have zero skills for that. And then backtrack. You'll also never convince most kids that they'll need algebra for a trade because most people can't connect that you need algebra to budget and other basics of life.

Vocational track was a thing when I was a kid. And it didn't matter much because kids who could do it were capable of doing college track if they wanted and kids who could nevet do collegr track and needed mandatory attendance couldn't even read. Maybe the gap is narrower these days, but i don't think a vocational track is encourages the bottom. I do think it's a good thing to expose kids as an option, just to explain that nowadays even trades require schooling after high school if you want to get certified, etc. It's just shorter with more lab type classes a la engineering.

Amen to this. Frankly i would go a step further and say that any student that doesn’t show a real interest and propensity for STEM should be equally encouraged and introduced to trade school and apprenticeship options as well as college with equal emphasis.

You will serve those students better and society as a whole.

Trades still include hard work and rule following for a long time. And many trades have a culture of crusty old assholes being in charge and then turning the young entrants into the crusty old assholes. I think there will still be a large segment of the population that will see gang and criminal activities (fraternity, high-reward, party lifestyle) as a more compelling career choice

That sounds like a difficult environment, and as they say "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

However, here's a few things I'd be trying:

1) Stories. One of the best uni professors I had was always breaking up his lessons with Stories. The time some people exploded a whale with dynamite, the Lawnchair Larry flight, the time he was held at knife Point while travelling. It just made the lectures more fun and made you feel good for having showed up.

2) Inspiring examples. I'd be inclined to work to find people who had been in their situation and gotten out. Bring them to class, get them to tell their stories.

3) Relevance. Making teaching examples that are edgy and somewhat relevant to their interests. If you're teaching English, use street slang in your examples. If you're teaching math, make examples about making money etc, getting creative and meeting your world with theirs.

Agree with all this. The key is to make it relatable to the students in some way.

My son was struggling with Romeo and Juliet because of the archaic language, and the teacher never explained what many of the words and phrases meant. I would sit down with him and explain a scene in modern terms eg “OK, so basically the boys are going to a party, and one of Romeo’s friends is telling him not to be a stick in the mud and sulk off in the corner, but to actually have fun and talk to people”.

At the beginning the play was completely alien to him. By the end, working together, he came to understand that the play engaged in timeless themes that are as true today as they were 400 years ago (love, prestige, ego, jealousy, anger, despair, remorse, etc).

It sounds like a problem that punishing students for not showing up doesn't solve. Incentives (like pay for attendance) that help to alleviate some of the issues causing attendance problems (by your own words, poverty among them) seem like a good start. At the bottom of it is a very rough and ill-enforced social contract, though. People in these positions don't believe that society cares much to reward their positive qualities (and it often doesn't).

I imagine that you did your very best, you tried to meet your students where they're at, and tried best as you could to make your class room a safe place.

> What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?

Probably something different and specialized compared to kids in the other 80% of schools. Like residential boot camp.

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