Attendance for Classes that Meet Irregularly

Jennifer Welch

We offer private music lessons which are graded P/F and attendance is taken. The problem is that they are not on a regular schedule but rather arranged between the music teacher and student. Does anyone face a similar situation and, if so, how do you set up these classes so attendance can be taken?

Brian Gray

@Jennifer Welch - We also have private music lessons for students. We schedule ours as activities, not classes. We do not record attendance, although we could if we wanted to.

• We have a seven day rotating schedule, identified as days A - G
• we have an 8 period day
• the notation E4 means 4th period on E day
• a private lesson is scheduled at a fixed time each rotation (A2 or D3, for example)

I created an activity (Fine Arts Private Lesson, activity code FAPL). I create roughly 200 sections (one for each teacher-student meeting. If the same teacher and student meet twice per rotation, there are two sections - one for each meeting.

I created an Activity schedule set (US Activity - Letter Day). Each class period has its own entry in the schedule set. (There are three other meeting times per day (before school, before school plus first period, and after school. These are used for another type of activity/lesson.) Setting this up is tedious, but you only have to do it once.

I assign a teacher, location, student, and meeting time to each section. The meeting appears on the schedule for both student and teacher. If the scheduled meeting time changes, I change the schedule for the activity section.

The process would be the same if you create the lessons as an academic course instead of an activity. We create it as an activity because the lessons themselves do not have any academic credit associated with them. Students have the option of enrolling in an academic class that will award a Fine Arts credit if they fulfill specific requirements in addition to taking the lessons.

The academic class is not scheduled. Each person who teaches lessons with students who want the credit has a section in the course, with all of their students enrolled in that one section. The pass/fail grade is recorded here.

This approach allows the teacher to record all grades in one section, instead of having to go to a separate section for each student.

It works for us. Your mileage may vary.