Does It Matter How Its Taught?: Is Attendance Necessary?

Does it Matter how its Taught?: Is Attendance Necessary?

The first thing that I began to think about is my own personal experience with this question in the first day of class. The reason being is that I have been in college for now 4 years and I am severely behind in terms of a 4-year degree at this point. I have had my times to think about what I like in terms of teaching style, but never had the right teacher to make me believe in the style. In this essay I hope to convince you (the reader) that it is mostly the way the student looks for flaws in the teaching style instead of embracing it. Also I will explain that in certain places across the country that certain teaching styles are easier to students in certain environments.

In my early years at school there are many different teaching styles that I encountered. First being the large lecture hall, then the small freshman writing classes, the hands on theatre classes and the many other different style and size classes. The larger lecture style classes were already over filled due to the university's demand for these classes. The teacher would come in and just sit down, take role and call on the same students who usually understood the material a little better that the rest of the class and then we would leave. Repetition I have learned is a nightmare to some students, this is no learning environment for most students, even in our class the larger percentage of students couldn't wait until time was up. Only a few got the time and effort of help from the professor, who normally didn't even answer our question stating that "This is a lecture class format and if you can't figure it out I can't help you". Now this may not be true for some professors, and perhaps this professor just didn't have the time or knowledge but the question is how is it taught, and this is not the right way.

The second style of teaching that I will point too is the smaller more group-oriented classes where discussion is more prevalent. Question and answer from the instructor is more common and group exercises help students understand the basis for argument. Argument is a small tool to help students take different sides to a topic is one of the greatest teaching tools but has a few opponents however. Gerald Graff writes in the Yale University Press " A second secret is that persuasive argument is not only the ur-discourse of academia, but an extension of the more familiar forms of persuasion that drive the public discourse of journalism and often the talk of students themselves". In laymen's terms is that argument is part of our everyday lives and we shouldn't take it out of the classrooms.

Our Major concern as students used to be can I get though this class period, and some of us still do this. However we need to find the right teaching styles to suit our specific needs. Some teaching styles are better for students in rural area's where their life is dominated by the local economy. Others help students get off the streets to further influence their next step to a better life. The last and most important thing about how the teachers are doing it these days is that most students just don't want to come to class anyway.

The first thing I learned to do when I first went to college was forget about class and do something else. That was the ultimate mistake, my first semester I missed more classes than I have missed in the past two years combined. The reason for most students to miss classes is they now have the opportunity where as in the past they have been heavily penalized by most high schools for skipping. All those classes that I did miss my first semester eventually caught up too me in my grades. All semester long I went to class for tests and quizzes and to turn in papers unaware (or ignorant to it) of the Universities attendance policy. I did fairly well until I got my grades, then I realized that the A's and B's that I thought that I had turned into something a lot lower than I wanted. A small price to pay for not going to class and potentially failing out was turned into a life long lesson for me.

Recently the research that I have been doing for this paper gave me a couple of new ideas about how the students should react to the different attendance policies. The first thing we as students should realize is to always go to class regardless to the attendance policy of the university. At some point you or your parents are paying for the classes you are attending and you should go all of the time. But where is it necessary to go to class, at some point there are certain factors that come into a students mind and class just isn't the first thing that they think of. Some students believe they are better off learning the material on their own; sometimes there right and sometimes they are wrong. Should they be punished for trying in certain situations, lets look at a large lecture class again. There are 200 students in a small stadium where one speaker must make