July always has me thinking ahead to the upcoming school year, but I usually think back a year to what some of my concerns for the previous year were. Year after year I have found myself surprised at how many of my expectations either end up unimportant or how some of my fears become greatly exaggerated as the year passes, with anecdotes and stories to spare to support them. One issue that I tackled every week in my classes this past year was the willingness for students to miss school or individual classes for a variety of reasons—many of them valid—yet so many of the ones who missed consistently were not always able to miss many of the activities we took part in in class in order to practice or deepen our skills without suffering academically. While I do not think that I can propose solutions for the many reasons that require students to be in other places, I do think I can take some time this summer to plan for those absences without sacrificing the quality of work that I expect from my students while also tapping one particular strength of the English or Language Arts classroom. This post will explore the line of reasoning that many of our students use to miss school repeatedly while I try to uncover some of the other benefits that students miss when they are absent.
Looking back at some of my communications with colleagues throughout the second half of the school year, I remember sending a New York Times article during our Spring Break to a few English teachers in my hall. Entitled “Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere”, it outlined several of the reasons that we know students miss school as well as one of the central ideas why they feel fine in missing so often: Our students and parents both view school as an optional activity that is easily skipped in favor of a variety of “better” uses of their time. Our schools have done such a good job of teaching students that they should stay home if they do not feel well or do not feel like coming in, and they have taken that lesson to heart far more seriously than many of the other lessons we have tried to help them learn. My colleagues and I remarked upon some of the strange cases in just the past year where students have warned us they will be absent, like that they needed to take a half day absence because they wanted to go five minutes down the road to get ice cream and sleep—and both they and their parents thought this was a better use of their time than attending lessons. Although the reason rarely matters even when many of the events they are attending are successive school-sanctioned events day after day and week after week, this reinforces a set of values where, as so many others have remarked, school has become another “optional” thing in their lives that can easily be made up at some other time. Any change to a class or curriculum needs to remember this mindset as they incorporate other ways for students to succeed.
This absenteeism problem has reached the point where even members of our government have felt the need to address the trend. A White House Webinar pairs the absence problem with a lack of student engagement, which may be a place to start in order to correct these and other interconnected issues. Among many of their recommendations are solutions teachers are already employing, like creating a welcoming and open classroom environment for everyone, acknowledging the value that every student brings to the classroom, giving students as much personal and differentiated coaching and help as possible, and incorporating more active learning activities like Project-Based Learning. For more information on methods that schools might use to address the general trend of absenteeism, the attached handout offers many suggestions for reaching out to families, establishing relationships to make sure students receive support for all of the needs that might draw them out of school, and keeping everyone informed as to the protocols surrounding attendance and the needs that school might help students meet. The US Department of Education even has a page devoted to Chronic Absenteeism in Our Nation’s Schools, which explores many of the trends in our nation’s students over the last few decades. Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic, 1 in 5 high school students was categorized as chronically absent according to the standard of missing more than 15 days in a single school year. Evidence points to a worsening of that number across the nation and across many academic levels over the last few years.
Yet English teachers often find themselves in a unique curricular placement; many of the ways that we have students work can often be done outside of our regular classroom environments, though sometimes students assume that means they can do the learning and the work without us or without taking part in any of the activities that we have planned for them. Some students may not see the value of the type of work and thinking we try to cultivate in our classes and thus may perceive it as something that can be done whenever they feel like doing so with no difference in what our students eventually produce. This is where teachers may be able to influence students’ decisions to attend school by involving them in many of the decisions we would otherwise make in the classroom, perhaps giving them a sense of ownership that they might feel is lacking. Students cannot help make those decisions if they are not there with us to make them. Some of those decisions could be as small as the order in which we complete certain activities or as large as what we are learning next, and allowing classes to make their own decisions likewise creates a specific context that will not exist anywhere else except within the environment we create with them. Making sure that our instruction is also student-centered through means like Project-Based Learning or Project-Based Writing may also change their understanding of what learning is or looks like, and those efforts could go a long way towards helping our students see more value in something we have taught them to discard over the last few years.
As teachers we know that students miss much more than a lesson when they are absent, though sometimes it is those unplanned lessons or unanticipated contexts that help deliver the full-bodied education we want our students to receive. This is at the heart of Brad Aaron Modlin’s poem “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”, for while we may be able to plan for absences, we cannot always plan for the things that arise when we gather dozens of unique individuals together for even a short amount of time. This tension might also be one of the most powerful forces for keeping education and our schools interesting—both for the students we serve and ourselves! In the end, English teachers also equip our students to tell stories, one of the fundamental strengths humanity itself has studied for ages, and we can show them the beautiful stories they miss when they are not there to be a character within them. By absenting themselves from our classroom, they allow others as much a chance to write their stories as they do, using data about them from a variety of stories. Only by being there as much as they can can students truly get the most out of our classes and actively write their own stories, unless they prefer for others to write about them instead without incorporating their own experiences. A strategy built around storytelling, story creation, and story consumption that starts on the very first day of school might offer students the greatest opportunity to re-engage with the world that so desperately needs them.
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