How do you handle students going on mid-year vacations?
Mid-year family vacations leave teachers overwhelmed with preparing work for students who rarely complete it, only to return to a mountain of makeup work and group projects that have to be done solo. Managing endless extensions and alternative assignments creates extra work for educators, forcing some to put the onus entirely back on the students to catch up.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1making alternative assignments
- 2giving endless extensions
- 3figuring out how students do group projects solo
- 4preparing work for students to do while away
- 5Sending a link to Google Drive with directions to check slides and assignments independently
- 6Posting all notes and assignments on Google Classroom
- 7Saving all class work and handing it to students when they return
- 8Using template responses or sarcastic replies about missing class
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I am beyond over having to constantly make alternative assignments, give endless extensions, and work around mommy and daddy taking their kid out of school for a week or longer in the middle of the school year.”source ↗
“Now I have to figure out how your student does a group project solo and prepare work for them to do while they’re away even though we all know they aren’t going to do a single thing.”source ↗
“Inevitably I look like the bad guy when they come back to a mountain of work”source ↗
“I’m sure most people here can relate to the annoyance of “I’m gonna be gone on vacation for twelve weeks, do you think I’ll miss anything?””source ↗
“I have so many students missing/skipping class or randomly going on vacations that I figure it’s fair to put the onus on them to get caught up.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 2How to survive a mid-year maternity leave teaching position