Warm welcome, delayed exit
How I handle students who arrive late
Fourth period begins at 10:20 and most students are already writing in their notebooks. Matt arrives a few minutes late and tries to enter quietly, but the door bangs against the wall as he walks in, which causes several students to look up from their writing. The concentration of the rest of the class, especially tenuous at the start of the lesson, has been broken. What to do?
For a long time, I told students like Matt to "please be on time" as they walked in the door. At first I thought this phrase would fix the problem on its own, but those students continued to be late. And not only were they were late, but I'd made them feel unwelcome, too, by reprimanding them as soon as they walked in the door.
Even though I knew "please be on time" didn't work, whether for my 7th graders or my 12th graders, I kept at it because I didn't know what else to do. I've since began experimenting with a strategy I call "warm welcome, delayed exit."
Warm welcome, delayed exit
Here's what it looks like: When a student arrives late I say the same thing to them that I tell all of my students: "good morning," or "good afternoon," or "nice to see you." I try to smile and speak warmly and and keep my voice free of judgement or sarcasm. I want them to feel welcome and that I'm genuinely glad to see them, even though I'm frustrated that they're late, maybe for the third time this week. I mark them late in the register and continue teaching.
At the end of the lesson students complete an exit ticket on a sticky note, which they hand to me as they leave. If the student had arrived late to the lesson, I look at the exit ticket, hand it back to them, and say, "Can you hang on for a moment? I want to talk to you about something."
Once I've finished checking the other students' exit tickets I return to the student who was late. "I noticed you were late," I tell them. "What's up?"
The student inevitably has an excuse, and sometimes they're reasonable. What if I reprimand a student for being late, not knowing that they were waiting in the nurse's office for their insulin? To steal a line from David Foster Wallace, it might not be probable, but it's not impossible, either.
Even if they are at fault, students will often say, "It's just one minute!" And my instinct in the moment is to agree with them. I don't want to be petty. On the other hand, they'll begin class nearly 120 times over the course of the year. Take one minute off the top of each of those and they will have missed two hours of the best learning time there is: focused review and consolidation. Being on time also communicates an important idea that will carry through the rest of our math lesson: precision matters.
The point of hearing the student out isn't to judge whether or not their excuse is valid. Instead, it's about problem-solving. A few years ago I read an article in Mental Floss which listed several specific causes of being late and what to do about them. People aren't just late because they're disorganized or careless — there's often something else going on. In my case, when I'm late it's usually because I've tried to cram in one more task or activity rather than be a few minutes early. I also tend to underestimate how long things take. I find that treating tardiness as fixable is much more helpful than reprimanding a student and hoping they can put the pieces together on their own.
In addition to providing an opportunity to find solutions, it also has the side benefit of costing the student a few minutes of the break that follows my class. The consequence is built-in, prompt, and roughly equal in measure to the infraction.
An example
Recently I had a conversation with a 10th grader who is almost always late when our class follows the lunch break. He explained that he likes to play football and loses track of time. Our school doesn't have bells, there's no clock visible from the field, and he leaves his phone on the side of pitch. His only cue that it's time to go in for class is when he's one of the last students left outside.
There's no easy solution here, it least not one that he and I can implement on our own.1 The best we could come up with was for him to pay attention to other students as they started to head in. Maybe he just needs to follow the first wave in, rather than the last. Regardless of whether he and I can solve this problem in the short term, "warm welcome, delayed exit" allows me to show that I'm on his side while also providing a small incentive for him to improve.
It's not perfect
In summary, I welcome students warmly at the start of class (warm welcome), and at the end I make sure to spend a minute or two talking with them about why they're late (delayed exit).
Or at least I try to. I'm still human, after all, and I know that sometimes my frustration sometimes shows when a student arrives late time after time. And while I know that I should always have a conversation with students who arrive late, sometimes there are too many of them, or there's a more pressing concern to attend to. Still, I try to provide a warm welcome and a delayed exit. It's the only thing I've found that works.
You might be thinking that it’s “time for him to get a watch!” I agree, but he doesn’t like how they feel.
Set a loud alarm on his phone?