{"id":27385,"date":"2025-10-30T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/?p=27385"},"modified":"2025-10-29T11:38:48","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T18:38:48","slug":"open-space-taking-attendance-is-detrimental-to-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2025\/10\/30\/open-space-taking-attendance-is-detrimental-to-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Space<\/em>: Taking attendance is detrimental to learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taking attendance in post-secondary education is an unnecessary practice that removes students\u2019 ability to seek out occasional, one-time learning experiences. We get it: you want us to show up, but don\u2019t we deserve a touch of autonomy?<\/p>\n

Taking attendance at this age is infantilizing. I\u2019m one of the older students around, so I haven\u2019t had to stick my hand up and half-shout \u201cHere!\u201d in a while, but I truly believe that this is a wholly unnecessary part of my adult education. And let\u2019s get one thing straight\u2014this is adult learning in the ordinary policy sense: additional study pursued after initial education.<\/p>\n

As students in post-secondary education, we have a lot on offer. There are tons of beneficial lectures, talks, and other events that happen throughout the year, but not all of them line up nicely with our class schedules. I had to miss out on the Truth and Reconciliation ceremony that was held last month in order to attend one of my classes. As a foreigner who is still integrating himself with society here in Canada, I\u2019m gutted that I missed out on that opportunity, but I\u2019m still torn on what the \u201ccorrect\u201d choice was here\u2014should I have attended the ceremony and risked my attendance, or was I correct in maintaining my attendance and missing out on this learning opportunity instead?<\/p>\n

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This story originally appeared in our October 29, 2025 issue.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I understand, as do many of my fellow students, that \u201cshowing up and putting in the hours\u201d is one of the core tenets of holding down a job in \u201cthe real world.\u201d But think of it this way\u2014an event put on by the college, let\u2019s say a visiting speaker who is relevant to your degree, is happening at the same time as one of your classes. Would you maintain your perfect attendance and skip the event, or would you skip your class, attend the event, and catch up on the course learnings later but risk your attendance score?<\/p>\n

To put a real-world spin on it, let\u2019s think of the college as our employer, and an opportunity for education outside of class as a company BBQ. Would you skip the company BBQ, an important team-building event, in order to continue working like normal? If your answer is \u201cit depends on how I\u2019m handling my workload,\u201d then you understand the exact point that I\u2019m trying to make here. These one-time events are crucial to broadening our horizons and we, as adults, should be able to make the call as to whether or not we can fit it into our personal workload.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of us already understand that if we don\u2019t put in the work for our classes, then we will fail. We\u2019re already here, every single day (and often into the night) studying, attending lectures, taking part in our labs, and, overall, fighting to succeed. Don\u2019t we deserve a bit of anxiety-free autonomy if a genuine learning opportunity arises? For the students that don\u2019t understand this, then I say that they deserve the autonomy to learn; after all, there\u2019s a reason why we all know not to touch a hot stove, and it\u2019s better to fail now and learn this lesson early in life rather than later.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not advocating for more time away from classes, by any means\u2014you can ask any of my teachers, past or present. What I\u2019m advocating for here is our autonomy as adults entering (or re-entering) the workforce to make our own decisions about what we can handle, without fear of unnecessary repercussions.<\/p>\n

We will do what we need to do to succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taking attendance in post-secondary education is an unnecessary practice that removes students\u2019 ability to seek out occasional, one-time learning experiences. We get it: you want us to show up, but don\u2019t we deserve a touch of autonomy? Taking attendance at this age is infantilizing. I\u2019m one of the older students around, so I haven\u2019t had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27375,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[341,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-october-29-2025","category-views"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27386,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27385\/revisions\/27386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}