Posts Tagged ‘How to Handle Student Excuses’
October 1 - A Smart Way to Handle Student Excuses
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Classroom Management
Students and excuses seem to go hand in hand. Sometimes the excuses result from real events and personal problems that legitimately prevent a student from being in class, completing an assignment on time, or doing what some other policy or procedure may stipulate. Not having the wisdom of Solomon, most faculty struggle to fairly adjudicate between the real and unreal reasons offered for noncompliance.
April 24 - Teaching Large Classes: Strategies for Managing Large Lecture Courses
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies, Teaching and Learning
Once I passed my 50th semester of introductory biology, I began to regret that my profession doesn’t have a real apprenticeship for teaching—why should every young professor facing his or her first big class…have to make the same mistakes I did and, perhaps more important, why should they not know that everybody…has the same problems?
March 12 - Dealing with Student Deceptions: What to do with ‘Death in the Family’ Excuses
By: Karen Eifler in Effective Teaching Strategies
Early in my professorial career, I noticed two patterns: (1) requests for extensions on papers and forgiven absences spiked immediately prior to major breaks, and (2) dying grandparents were nearly always the explanation offered for those requests. I definitely wondered, and sometimes felt guilty, about the close correlation between expiring relatives and due dates listed on my syllabus.
June 12 - How to Handle Student Excuses
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Classroom Management
“Grandpa’s heart exploded, but he’s fine now,” one student reported the morning after missing a scheduled exam. “I caught dyslexia from another student last semester,” responded another when his teacher asked him about all the spelling mistakes in his paper. And then there was the pet rabbit that swallowed a needle on the day of the big group presentation. Excuses like these are so preposterous that they can’t help but make us laugh, but dealing with them is no laughing matter.
