They're just kids

[Yojimbo]

Dang. You being serious? In my school if your absent for 5 days you fail the semester. The reason that they institute policies like this are not always for the benefit of the student, or to make sure that the student is learning, per se, since like DJ, many students find the level of education offered at the public school level to be full of it and are actually better off studying on their own. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, a teacher once informed me that the school receives a fee from the government per student for every day that the student attends school. This means that if you ditch and are not present for roll call, the school does not get whatever daily pittance it gets from the state for having a student at school for that particular day. Interestingly, I was actually told back in the day by a sympathetic teacher that if I wanted to ditch and not have the administration come crashing down on my ass that I should at least attend homeroom every day, regardless of whether or not I went to class, since it was in homeroom where the official tally of attendance for the day was taken. So, to recap, your school's policy about absences has nothing to do with education and everything to do with funding. While I have a lot of respect for those folks who go into teaching (and what a thankless profession that can be!) I do suspect that the teachers union, at least here in Los Angeles, is also motivated less by the educational welfare of it's students and more by salary increases and increases in individual teacher's benefits. If they cared about teaching, they would not stage the regular walkouts and strikes that they seem to do everytime they have a union grievance, leaving the students without their daily dose of education. But on the subject of whether or not you should attend class, I don't believe that anyone should think that ditching class is an acceptable option. Like DJ, I was able to ditch the majority of my classes and still earn a 3.5 (not the best GPA, I will admit) for graduation since I was studying rather than going to classes. I was not spending all of my time partying or being stupid, which many kids who ditch are off doing. Realistically, if I could go back and do it all again, I feel that it would have been easier for me had I stayed with the program, since ditching gave me some bad habits of thinking of myself above the law that others had to follow, and made it all the more difficult to fall into place when I made my way into the university system. Once there, I must tell you, it took me a semester of hitting bottom and going on Academic Probation to realize that ditching high school and neglecting to attend my lectures in college were two different matters.

[darth los]

Why isn't there an emoticon that gives the finger? Because it would be used to the point of naseum !! There's one in the chatroom, atleast there used to be.