Sometimes it’s helpful to stop and think about another group who often doesn’t get the thanks they deserve: the students who quietly hang in there, day after day, not giving up despite the constant pull telling them they can and should, and that there are minimal consequences for doing so.
The calendar doesn’t lie: you’re not going to finish the book before finals. Whether things took longer than you expected, your school administrators threw unanticipated schedule changes your way, or you just miscounted (it’s happened to us all), you’re stuck wondering what to do.
There are meaningful activities you can do with your students in those last weeks that will help make things feel a little bit more manageable for everyone and, perhaps, buy you a few more minutes to work through your to-do list.
An essential foundation for any successful strategy addressing academic honesty is a direct discussion with students about cheating in your classroom. You might be tempted to assume we all have the same working definition of cheating. We do not.
“To Catch a Cheater” could be the title of a hidden camera investigation episode of a tv news show or…
The student with chronic absences is an entirely different situation altogether. This type of absent student is not the one who misses a week of class because of a particularly bad case of the flu, one with chronic absences tends to miss at least one, if not more, day every.single.week. It’s like they’re on a completely different calendar than the rest of us.