Reply to Increase Absenteeism in Midle/Upper SES students not due to illness?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, it's a huge problem, and growing. Mostly school avoidance and mental health issues. No one is sure exactly what the cause is. I think the rolling gradebook and the required 7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter might have something to do with it - work just piles up and up and quickly becomes overwhelming.[/quote]

7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter is not a lot of work.  It's very little work.

The attendance is bad because of the crappy schedule and residual effects of how FCPS implemented covid computer learning and post covid computer learning and grading scales.

Ask any parent of teens

Fcps made consistent in person school and deadlines irrelevant for the current crop of kids. It will be like this for a few more years.[/quote]

I am a parent of a teen. I am also a teacher. 7 assignments is much more graded work than we ever had when I was in school. We usually had one or two tests per quarter, and max one other thing to hand in. Maybe some small homework assignments that were stuck together into one grade. 7 graded assignments is actually a lot. As teachers, we sometimes have trouble getting them all in. When a student misses some school, they are almost certainly going to get far behind in assignments, and just getting them caught up becomes a major thing. There is no way a kid who missed a week or two of school can easily catch up in all their classes. So they start avoiding work and avoiding school, and the problem spirals. We watch it happen over and over.

We don't even want to give that many separate assignments. [/quote]

I am likely older than you, but when I was in school we had frequent tests and homework.  I also recall a very lengthy "term paper," with footnotes, etc.  History tests, were usually short answer, multiple choice, and a couple of essay questions.  Our chemistry teacher made us memorize the periodic chart in order to do equations quickly.  French had vocabulary and grammar quizzes every Friday.  In English, we read assigned novels with essay questions on tests.  I recall [i]Red Badge of Courage [/i]and [i]Moby Dick[/i] my junior year, but I think there was also a lot of poetry.  Senior year English was Shakespeare and [i]Canterbury Tales[/i], as I recall  Again, lots of writing involved along with discussion in class.  
I do know we had frequent tests and quite a bit of homework in all classes.  This was in a public school in a very red state.[/quote]

I doubt you can actually remember the frequency of homework. But we don't do weekly quizzes anymore. We can't. Since we have to allow all those makeups, we'd spend forever just giving quizzes.  [/quote]

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