Can I be excused?
This phrase is taught to toddlers and instilled in children throughout their formative years as a way to politely ask to leave the dinner table. It’s a sign of submission, that until a certain age, an individual is at the whim of their guardian to determine when they should be present and when they are absent.
I remember how excited I was to turn 18. Kelly Walsh High School in Casper, WY, at the time, allowed students to sign a paper that granted them the ability to call and excuse themselves– rather than by their parents– from classes. Finally, the opportunity to break away from adults’ supervision and approval of my absences. It was freedom, and a taste of growing up.
Now I’m 21, and feel like a toddler once again at the table asking if I can please be excused. Except it’s no longer my parents I have to take it up with. It’s instructors. Supervisors. The Dean of Students Office themselves.
Attendance policies vary greatly from professor to professor. Some have a rough number of days you’re allowed to miss, but will remain lenient if you simply communicate your absences with them. Others never check attendance at all. Others require written and excused absences, and start deducting points for every non-excused absence after so many missed days.
According to UW’s website, the average in-state undergraduate cost of attendance for the 2022-2023 school year is $18,682. That price almost doubles for out-of-state undergrad students, with the yearly average sitting at $33,832.
Why, then, did I have more freedom and ease excusing myself from classes as an 18 year-old in a free public school than I do as a grown woman paying thousands of dollars for a class I chose to be in?
I, as I think many others do, appreciate the underlying care for students and their education that some instructor’s strict attendance policies display. A good instructor should care about their students and encourage them to engage with the material.
In some instructors’ defense, these policies reflect the real world. When you start a job, you only have so many days off, and you might have to get certain absences approved with HR. But college is not like a real job, the opposite actually– we lose money to be here. Young adults should be allowed to miss class as much as they want. After all, we pay to be here.
Let students have the real-world experience of dealing with consequences of not coming to class or engaging in their work. Give them the freedom to make their own choices, make the wrong choices, and learn from them. It’s better we fail now than later on, when the stakes are much higher.
Grown adults shouldn’t have to request an excuse for missing a day due to medical reasons, religious observations, or legal obligations. Instructors should trust their students to get the material they missed and be responsible for their own life and learning. What a wonderful skill we could be imparting on young people, and I hope more instructors will consider changing their policies to grant us more freedom.
As a former professor, I wholeheartedly concur with the writer’s premise. It is also why I instilled the incentive into my students of the importance to attend class. Every class carried with it quiz points, project points, participation points, and so forth. And those were then added to midterm and final exams, along with extra credit, which was relative any of the aforementioned. Each students was allowed two make-up opportunities, just because “life happens.” Everything was upfront and objective, with each student being able to track just where they were throughout the semester. Why was there so much attention and detail focused on seemingly irrelevant data? Life experience had long-since taught me that the data was not irrelevant at all.
Now, could the student skip class or willfully dismiss him- or herself? Sure. He or she is a young (and sometimes older) adult. Decisions matter. And they knew what it would cost them, if they made for the wrong reasons. Most of my students went on to earn masters and doctorates in a wide variety of disciplines, some from prestigious halls of academia, and are now productive citizens throughout the US and abroad. The few that made poor or immature decisions, such as wasting valuable resources (namely tuition and time), so they could go play, are reaping the fruit of their hard, dead-end, labor too. Again, decisions matter. They are now finding that out “in the real world.” That is not to say all college grads are grandiose successes, nor that are all college flunkies dismal dregs in society. What does mean is that the odds for success are against the student who goes the route of immaturity, disrespect, or poor decision-making than for the student who wills to do the opposite, the latter of which seems to be, unfortunately, on the decline these days.
So, kudos to Ms. Trujillo and her perspective. Now, you have a former professor’s perspective to go along with it.