The Chinese school system is pretty strict when it comes to attendance. If a student needs to miss a class because they are sick, or have an appointment, or need to catch a bus, they always ask for permission beforehand. My personal policy is “no biggee.” I don’t keep track of attendance and as long as they don’t miss class that often, I could care less.
This semester I have class Friday afternoon. As it is the students only class after lunch Friday, it is my biggest problem for attendance and I have one or two students “asking for leave” every week. If the students have to go somewhere over the weekend, they usually want to head out at lunchtime and thus, miss my class. (Which is history class, not the most exciting of subjects.) The cause for most of the missed classes on Friday is one thing: weddings.
So I made up a new policy. If the students have to miss class for a wedding, fine, no problem. All they have to do is bring me back a bag of wedding candy. It’s not a very hard requirement. Wedding candy is a feature of pretty much every wedding, and if the students are traveling to a wedding during the school year it means they usually know the bride or groom pretty well (they wouldn’t leave for a second cousin or anything), so snagging an extra box of candy has proven not very difficult.
This policy is going just grand. To give you an example this is a picture of one weeks bounty. Yes people, one week. (Admittedly a very wedding filled week.) Best. teaching policy. Ever.
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