Thirsty for knowledge

This is going to make me look very bad, probably with reason.

So, this is my first year, and I spent most of the fall abroad, so that I didn’t really know what to expect from the students. Very naively and based on my own experience as a student (hysterical laughter) I did not think of establishing rules regarding presence at practical sessions. And we noticed that a large number of them were skipping them and appeared whenever pleased them.

So after a few weeks we made clear that we considered attendance compulsory and that any unjustified absence would mean a zero for that report. It improved for a while but we’re now sort of back to the initial situation ; except that now they just come up with crappy unverifiable excuse like : «I had hypoglycaemia », « my alarm’s batteries died » (this practical is at 10.45am and she lives on campus). Some don’t even bother justifying.

One of the problems is that they work in pairs and once the work is started it is tricky to cancel their work. And strictly speaking, they did justify it.

I’m learning a lot in this and I can tell you that I’ll establish very strict rules on this right from the beginning next year. I realize how naive I was to assume that we did not need to remind them of this and treat them like 8 years old…

Ah well.

But I still need to find a way for now…