A Student Always Absent Because Work

[Wahoo Redux]

The main reason to try and enforce attendance is really just to get them as high a grade as possible with as little whining as possible.

That isn't really why I take attendance. I found that when I didn't do it, it got to absurdly low levels and I couldn't even count on good students showing up regularly. It made it hard to have good discussions or do class activities.

So only constant monitoring (and the implicit threat behind that) makes most of the students show up for class?  That suggests a lamentable lack of self-motivation.  Sounds like some of the traditional-age students among them are in for a rude lesson when they enter the world of work.

Most of them will be fine if not impressive workers. They know they are getting paid for work instead of paying for classes. Work they take seriously.  they may even want to work----school, not so much. 

I don't know how many slovenly, obviously-last-minute-first-draft papers I read from farm boys and girls in cow country talking about "the value of hard work" when clearly they were not working very hard at school.  "Work" to them was something different from "school."