Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I just received a memo this morning about faculty attendance, that the head discipline officer (and all around college secretary gofer) moved around and had teachers receive and sign for the memo. In the first place, it seems bad if the teachers have to sign to have received and read a memo that they can’t complain later that they didn’t know about, which is what happened with that thirteenth week debacle at the end of last term.

Secondly, who’s the employer and who’s the employee again? Because it seems the administration is the one bending over backwards here so as not to hear whining about things that really does not need worker input in the first place.

“We may be paid a lot but that doesn’t mean the school has to ensure that the students get their money’s worth by checking the teachers’ attendance.”

Why ask the majority of the faculty in the first place about whether there should be measures taken and implemented to determine if they teach their classes or not?

So attendance is now a matter of trust between the teacher and the administration. The students complaining to the dean is now a last minute resort if a teacher really is not showing up. But if the students are going to pass in that subject anyway without doing any work, then they won’t clamor.

Another pathetic allowance is that in the sent memo, there is a disclaimer saying that the lead times for deadlines set for making up of classes are just suggestions that will be changed after discussion in the next faculty assembly.

Well so much for learning from past mistakes. The two biggest time wasters in my memory of faculty assemblies has been when the discussion was long, tedious and roundabout with regards to checking student attendance and as to alternatives to having a faculty attendance checker.

Comments without any resolution were being bandied around for hours before the EVP eventually called for a vote that just showed that all that time was wasted on very vocal minority dissenters who just would not accept contrary opinion.

That’s probably one meeting I won’t be attending, or will go to bringing my lecture or papers to check while waiting for them to talk about something with more sense. And I will not participate in their debate or even vote.

Session 1651 believes by not going to class the students are already learning something. Class dismissed.