Attendance

Today I was reminded via email to submit attendance for a class that ISN'T EVEN HERE! The seniors are out of school to do their senior projects but we still have to take attendance. We mark that they are all here.... I happened to be working on this for another presentation:

Schools are all about numbers. Especially public schools. Numbers determine how many teachers you hire. Numbers determine how much funding you get. Numbers determine whether your teachers are effective. Numbers determine whether your school is passing or failing. Numbers even tell you how much your students are (or aren’t) learning.

The most vital part of a teacher’s job is to collect these numbers. They are equipped with planning books, attendance sheets, the latest in software programs that track student progress in numeric form. They are trained during their in-service meetings on how to use suites of new software, which constantly evolves to get the numbers right, to say nothing of giving software engineers that didn’t get to design games something to do.

One of the most important numbers teachers gather is attendance. If the students aren’t in school, the school doesn’t get paid for them. If the students aren’t in school, they are likely involved in some illegal activity and their parents are responsible for them, the last thing anyone wants. So over the years, one of the most common things for every teacher in every classroom was to take attendance. It may have involved chiseling marks onto a stone tablet,. It may have involved taping a sheet to the door once attendance was taken. It may have involved punch cards or scan-tron sheets, and often nowadays it only takes a few clicks of the mouse. No more chiseling for us!

Technology makes everything better but in this case it wasn’t really making any difference. It allowed for attendance to be sent to the main office electronically, but the results were no more impressive than when a student collected the sheets and they were compiled by a secretary. Now reports are run and teachers have to pore over excel spreadsheets to check up on students that might be gaming the system, no time has been saved, errors are still made, and the Numbers are not happy.

Enter RFiD. This is bound to make all the numbers and those who celebrate them stand up and sing. Oddly enough, teachers might be excited too, though that should generally only be used as an inverse function of success.

With doorways equipped with RFiD scanners, students need only wear or have their student ID’s on them at all times and they the system will automatically be aware of their location within the school. It will also record if they leave the building. If a student leaves their RFiD at home, luckily we will have a second one implanted in their laptops so there will be a backup system. As we’ve seen with EZ Pass, even if students run down the hallway at full speed, we’ll still get them

Suddenly incompetent teachers can’t get in the way of numbers. Overburdened secretaries can’t delay their triumph each and every day. Substitutes won’t be fooled by Jane calling here when Kristen’s name is called. Debates about who was tardy and who stayed in the bathroom too long will vanish, the numbers don’t lie. The numbers can’t lie.